Dear Alex, thank you for your idea about specialized software for making crossword puzzles.
When we started with this subject, several years ago, I did an extensive search and found many options but could not find anything suitable for our language, not even commercial. So back then, I purchased a licence of Crossword Forge (which we are still using for the word-crunching part of the game). Sadly their website has gone bad since and we are no longer getting updates; but my old Windows version is still working. Because of special language needs, I had to create some hacks, to be able to even make word-lists and create grids: - Apart from Unicode (which is now more mainstream) we have the complication that in our local alphabet we have got several letters which consist in two characters: GB, KP, NY, ?M and SH which need to be considered as one letter and which need to go into one crossword-box so that they will get used as one letter horizontally and vertically. - I am using dummy letters which I replace before each calculation-run and which I back-replace afterwords. - For printing this in different contexts (drafts), I even hacked one (opensource) font, to have the digraphs as one-glyphs so that even tools less powerful than Scribus would keep those "twins" properly together with correct "kerning". I had a quick look at the klest-crossword web-presence at Sourceforge. Their features look promising but the Sourceforge looks broken (today) in all my browsers, even in Google-cache. Right now rather stressed out with magazine-print-deadline needing shifting (bad), but will look again next chance. So Alex, nothing wrong with proper tools, which really work. I even agree to spend money on certain programs and on a few special-use fonts. Normally I am willing to learn about new tricks and new tools. But every new tool normally needs a few hours of getting-the-hang-of-it and adapting it to our language-needs and then figuring out a logical-workflow and document it, informing the team, etc. Yesterday, rather late, Scribus has tricked me. I had copied and pasted one small text-frame from another Scribus document and it destroyed my crossword-grid (same page, different layer, different style). Luckily I had zoomed so, that I caught it right away. (probably a bug, something to do with default-styles or whatever). So, preparing an eps or full-resolution .png in another tool and then just importing into Scribus like "any other illustration" is not a bad idea at all; will see. All for now, thank you all for your ideas and input, the-show-must-go-on, last corrections this afternoon and printing on Monday (unless we get evil power cuts again), good weekend for those who get them, Martin On 05.10.2017 11:21, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote: > On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:21 PM, H?kan L?fgren wrote: >> Hello Martin! >> >> Re: Crossword Puzzle >> >> What's wrong with Excel or Open Office Calc for making crossword puzzles? >> There you will get the grid and the tabs automatically. Then you import it >> into Scribus. Voila! > > Moreover, what's wrong with using specialized libre software for > making crossword puzzles that outputs pdf/ps along with png, tiff et > al.? > > Something like https://sourceforge.net/projects/klest-crossword/, for > instance. > > Alex > > ___ > Scribus Mailing List: scribus at lists.scribus.net > Edit your options or unsubscribe: > http://lists.scribus.net/mailman/listinfo/scribus > See also: > http://wiki.scribus.net > http://forums.scribus.net > -- ZASKE Martin responsable G?G? BP 50 - Bassila - B?nin tel G?G? 66.66.11.11 tel pers 97.44.62.95
