Fill up with words

You must select the Grid Edition thumb in the control panel to be able to add words to the grid. When this mode is selected you can add words to the grid manually or automatically.

You must also select the Letter tool in the Control panel to edit word letters.

Select cases and slots

Click left on the grid in order to select a case and the horizontal slot covering this case in which a word can be fitted. Cases in the selected slot are greyed and surrounded by a dashed line. Selected case in this slot is visually marked with a white circle.

Clicking right on a case of the grid has the same effect but the vertical slot is selected instead.

You can use the following keyboard keys when a case is selected this way:

Arrow Key: Move the selected case up, down, left and right.
Space: Turn the selected slot covering the selected case from horizontal to vertical.
Enter: Place a black square on the selected case.
Home: Change the selected case to the first case of the slot.
End: Change the selected case to the last case of the slot.
Del: Delete the selected case content.
Back: Delete the selected case content and move backward.
Escape: Unselect slot and case.
A-Z: Fill the case with a letter and move forward.

With the Letter tool you can select a black square or a picture and press Del to remove it.

Grid coloration

Press the button

in the toolbar to activate the grid coloration. Coloration enables to highlight blocking issues by painting grid cases background.

Letters belonging to a word existing in the selected dictionaries are painted in GREEN.
Letters belonging to a partial word for which at least one proposition exists are painted in BLUE.
Letters belonging to a word that does not exist in the selected dictionaries are painted in ORANGE.
Letters belonging to a partial word for which no proposition exists are painted in RED.

As a letter belongs to one vertical word and to one horizontal word, a letter background can be painted with two different colours.

An example is given in the picture below:

The word BOATS exists in the dictionary. Therefore all its letters background are partially painted in GREEN. However, the vertical word YYAYY does not exist and is painted in ORANGE.

Other letters belong to partial words. If at least one possibility exists, the background is painted in BLUE. In the other case it is painted in RED. It is the case of the three letters YYS for which no possibility exists.

Fill the grid manually

As you type letters in the grid, words that can be fitted in the selected slot are added to the propositions box in the control panel.

In the following example, the words must have 5 letters lengths and letters 2 - 3 must be "OA". Different words that fit the mask *OA*** are populated in the list box. They can be written in the grid by clicking on it. Click right on the list box to remove the word proposition.

The propositions box offers to options to refine the words in the list:

Black squares option enables to specify if the suggestions can contain words smaller than the selected slot length. If selected, the suggestions can contain words from length 2 up to the slot length. They are sorted by length and buttons on the right side of the list box enables to display all words for a given length.

If a word with a length smaller than the slot is selected, black square(s) are automatically added at the beginning and / or the end of the word.

If this option is not selected, only words with the exact slot length are populated in the list.

Correlation option enables to refine the words in the propositions box by correlating the suggestions with the perpendicular words. Let's consider the following example to illustrate the principle:

The proposition box is populated with all the dictionary words that match the mask GO****S. However some of them lead to an invalid state since they prevent to place words perpendicularly to them. For example if the word GOBBETS is selected, we get some letters to be painted in RED because it is not possible to find a word of the form HB*T or beginning by TT*P.

Therefore it is interesting to select the Correlation option in order to populate the box with only the words that don't prevent to place other words perpendicular to them. In our example we get fewer suggestions if the option is checked.

A small explanation of the different buttons and options is displayed in the status bar when hovering them with the mouse.

Fill the grid automatically

It is possible to try to fill the whole grid automatically thanks to the grid generator. You can access it through the Menu Tools > Grid Generator. This generator can work with blank grid, grid with pattern of black squares or even with partially filled grid. Grid generator configuration dialog is given in the following picture:

Seed: This parameter is a number used to initialize the random numbers generator. The generator is initialized at random if no value is specified. For an identical dictionary, initial grid state and seed the generation result is always the same.

Activation of the Permission to add new black cases box indicates the generator that it can add new black squares on the grid. In the other case, no any new bloc will be added to the grid. Following options are available if activated:

Max cases: This parameter indicates the maximum number of new cases the generator can add to the grid. If no number is specified the generator can add as many of new cases he wants.

At most this number is small, at most the grid generation is challenging. Most of time, generation of a grid with less than 13-14% of black cases is difficult. Less of 10% of black squares can only be achieved for small grids (less than 10x10).

Black squares density: This parameter gives the local rule specifying if a new black square can be added with regards to its neighbourhood. The different strategies are:

No neighbour: A black case can only be added by the generator if the 8 surrounding cases don't contain a black case.
Neighbour in diagonal: A black case can only be added by the generator if the 4 adjacent cases don't contain a black case.
2 adjacent neighbours maximum: A black case can only be added by the generator if the 4 adjacent cases contain at most 2 black cases.

Heuristic: Most of time using a heuristic allows to get quicker a solution for the generation. However it can happen the generator returns "no solution found" whereas a solution exists. The gain in speed is at the cost of the precision.

It is recommended to activate the heuristic unless that the generation failed or that you want to generate a very challenging grid (like a small grid with no black cases).

Press the button OK when you are ready to start the generation. Then a dialog giving the evolution of the generation is displayed to the screen:

The grid on the left of the dialog gives an indication of the generation progression. Number of cases painted in blue is proportional to the current filling rate of the grid. As the grid generation can not be deterministic in anyway, this rate perpetually increase and decrease until a solution is found (or until the generator gives up).

However, at most the rate stays low for a long time at most the generation is likely to last a lot of time.

You can press the button

at any time to pause momentarily the generation. You can press Cancel to cancel the generation.

Intro

Q-Word

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Select dictionaries

Edit grid pattern