Crossword Fiend Forum

The experiment is completed. Can Crossword Solver handle a puzzle with an unconventional numbering scheme? Via the masterful work of Will I. Johnston, the upshot is that, yes, indeed, it can.

I wrote the first version of this grid quite a few months ago after listening to a Ryan and Brian podcast. It's gone through several re-writes, mainly because the seed entries were awfully stingy with the fill possibilities. Will tweaked the seed entries which, thankfully, made the building effort much smoother.

There is a special clue category available in the lower half of the applet's right sidebar, while the Across and Down clues are living together like cats and dogs in the upper half. The highlighting of the appropriate Across and Down clues was a bit touch and go as I was solving. But each of those clues appears above the grid as you solve, just as they do in Across Lite, so that's no major setback.

Other than that, no spoilers in this post.

The Crossword Solver program is, of course, available free of charge at http://www.crosswordsolver.info/ .

Same puzzle, with 60% less toner/ink used for the black squares.

Below is a version of Roundabout puzzle with Across and Down clues presented normally, and special clues appended at the ends of the two sections. This retains the visibility of (at least) two red highlighted active clues in the clue area. It loses the roundabout flavor of the special clues.

Since the Crossword Solver program creates two fields of clues (one for Across clues and one for Downs), shouldn't creating three fields be just a matter of writing additional code, e.g.: [new sidebar field]?

Unless the sidebars' template is too deep for the puzzle constructor to access, I would think that creating a puzzle with three categories of clues would simply be a matter of adding a new header.

If not, then the Crossword Solver peeps should look into adding that capability to the constructor's template. I mean, adding features like oddball numbering seems a tad fruitless without adding a place to clue the oddball-numbered entries.

The xml specification for jpz files states that the number of clue titles (such as Across and Down) is a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 2.

Well, then the coders could just change "maximum of 2" to "maximum of 3". Or, to "maximum of 1,474,386,854,693". That's easy peasy stuff for coders.