WordSearch applet

Playing instructions | Configuration documentation | Source code

Playing the puzzle

This is the Weft WordSearch puzzle applet. To play it:

• Click 'start' to start
• Identify words from the list in the grid and drag the mouse over each from beginning to end (reverse drags do not count). When you drag over a word it will be marked on the grid and removed from the list.
• If you really can't find a word you can double-click on it in the list and it will be located on the grid - however, if you do this, you can't win!
• You can click 'reset' any time to get a new grid.
• When you have located all the words you may get a reward.

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Using the puzzle

The puzzle is simply an applet which may be embedded in an HTML page. The following parameters are recognised (all default sensibly):

• Colours (must be set as siz-digit hexadecimal values)
  • background
  • foreground
  • grid_background
  • grid_foreground
  • highlight
  • gridcolour
• Integers

  grid_x

  the number of cells horizontally in the grid, maximum 64

  grid_y

  the number of cells vertically in the grid, maximum 64

  mark_width

  the width in pixels of the line used to mark words

  font_size

  the size in points of the font used in the grid. Used only if supplied in conjunction with a valid font_name.

• Strings

  font_name

  the name of the font to use in the grid. One of

  • TimesRoman
  • Helvetica
  • Courier
  • Dialog
  • DialogInput

  Used only if supplied in conjunction with a valid font_size.

  reward_url

  the URL of the page to jump to as reward on successful completion of the puzzle

  welcome

  the message to show when the applet is initialised. Note that this does not get wordwrapped, so if you want neat formatting count your spaces!

  words

  a space separated list of words to use in the puzzle. We strongly advise against using words less than four characters long - there are two of these in our test set and I'm sure you will agree that they are hardest to find!

Possible errors

• If any word is too long to fit in the grid, an error will be shown.
• If too many words are supplied to lay out in the grid, an error will be shown. Note that in borderline cases the wordset may layout successfully in some instances and fail in others. Consequently, when using a new word list, the applet should be tested several times before being made public.

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Source code

The source code for this applet is here.