A crossword puzzle generator that creates dense puzzles, written in Scala.js.
https://papauschek.github.io/crossword-puzzle-maker
- Supports fixed crossword puzzle sizes, tries to use the available space most efficiently.
- Supports adding words from a dictionary to complete the puzzle
- Can be printed / exported as PDF (using the browser)
Crossword puzzle generators often create puzzles that need a lot of space, and contain a lot of whitespace (gaps). Sometimes you want a puzzle that fits a given size or space (e.g. for printing), and this is what this generator does.
The crossword puzzle algorithm takes your list of words as input, and then randomly generates many possible puzzles using these words. It then selects the puzzle with the most words (most density).
Web Workers are used to distribute the work of creating puzzles across multiple CPUs.
You need to have sbt installed. Run sbt fullOptJS to build the app. This bundles the app as a JavaScript file in docs/js/main.js.
Then you need to open docs/index.html in your browser. However, there is a catch: this app needs Web Workers to run in the browser. Most browsers (e.g. Chrome) disallow running web workers on files loaded from the local filesystem.
So you need some a local web server to serve the docs folder, and then you're good to go. Some IDEs like IntelliJ have a small web server included, so there you can right-click index.html and select "Open in Browser".
Crossword dictionaries from the following library are used: https://github.com/fiee/croisee/tree/master/wordlists
(License: see ./docs/data/croisee)
- The current algorithm also allows creating puzzles that wrap around the left and right edges of the puzzle. But this is currently not possible on the UI.