First, create a puzzle with Crossword Wizard. The puzzle can be either publication style (symmetrical, with many words) or free-form (asymmetrical, with exactly the words you want; this is the preferred choice for special interest puzzles, like anatomy, history, recording artists, etc..) You can specify both the words and the clues. The finished result should look like our sample interactive Java crossword.
WARNING: Do not use double quotes ( " ) in your clues. If you do, the puzzle will not display correctly because it confuses the HTML parser.
Next, save your puzzle with File/Save As HTML and give it a name such as CrosswordPage.htm. If you like, you can edit this page further using any Web Page composition program, such as FrontPage, PageMill, Netscape Gold, etc.. You can modify the page as you like; if you do, be sure to leave all the code between <APPLET> and <\APPLET> unchanged.
Finally, upload the page to your Web site and create a link to it, using your standard procedures. You do not need to upload any other files to your Web site. How's this possible? Because the Java Applet code is downloaded from our server directly to each person who is playing the puzzle. This accomplishes several purposes: it lets us update the applet without worrying about obsolete versions; it doesn't take up valuable time on your server; and it gives us an opportunity to invite the player to visit our site.
Each person who visits your site, and wants to play with the interactive puzzle, needs to have Java correctly installed and running.
In Netscape Navigator, this requires that you open the Options/Network dialog box, choose the Languages tab, and check "Enable Java". In Windows '95 and NT, our puzzles work with Netscape 2 and 3. In Macintosh, they only work with Netscape 3.
We are currently testing the brand-new Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, which should run our interactive Java puzzles. We'll update our site as soon as we've certified that it works.
Since not everyone has a Java-capable browser, you may want to put up a version of your puzzle in a non-interactive format, illustrated here. To accomplish this, you'll need to work a little bit harder. First, create a puzzle with Crossword Wizard as described above and save it. Then, use the Edit/Copy command, and choose Puzzle to Fill In. This will place a picture of the puzzle on the clipboard. Now open your favorite Web Page Publishing tool, create a new page, and choose Edit/Paste to drop in the puzzle. Depending on the tools you use and how they are configured, the image will be converted to JPEG or GIF automatically, or it may not appear at all. We recommend GIF as the preferred format, as it preserves the accuracy of the small clue numbers better than JPEG. If you are not getting the desired result by just pasting it in, you'll have to Paste the image into an image editing program, like PaintShop Pro, that will convert the original image into the format you desire explicitly; you can then incorporate the image into the Web page.
To create the clues, go back to Crossword Wizard, choose Edit/Copy, and select Clue Text (as Text). The clues will be copied as text to the clipboard. Now go back to the Web Page publisher and choose Edit/Paste; the text should be pasted into your page and you can then format it, or create a table and drop it into two columns, or whatever you like. Note: we've seen some publishing tools (notably FrontPage 1.0) fail to detect that there's new text on the clipboard and paste the picture again instead of the text; to solve this problem, open Notepad, paste the text in there, select all the text, copy it to the clipboard and paste it into FrontPage again.
For non-commercial uses, there are no licensing requirements for the Crossword Viewer Java Applet. For commercial use, please send us an e-mail describing your intended application.
To download the Java classes to your site, please click here.