An Arrowword puzzle is simply a crossword puzzle in which the clues are printed inside the body of the
puzzle in the spaces normally occupied by the pattern cells. You can attempt to create such an output for any crossword puzzle, but you won't always be
successful. Some puzzles don't have enough pattern cells to accomodate all of the clues, and the clues may no be able to be printed if they are too long.
Error messages are provided if you encounter either of these conditions.
Before printing your Arrowword puzzle, you can set some options which will change the appearance of the printed output...
A set of six Color Selection buttons allow you to change the colors of the following components
of the Arrowword puzzle.
Puzzle Cells. These are the cells in which a solver will enter the proposed solution letters.
Clue Cells. These are the cells into which the program will insert the text of the clues.
Pattern Cells. Those pattern cells which are not required for clues will be printed in a color selected here.
Arrows. Each clue has an attached arrow which points to the location where the solution is to be entered.
Lines. The lines are those which define the individual cells of the puzzle.
Text. Finally, the color of the clue text may be set by this control.
The arrows mentioned above may be drawn in any one of six Arrow Styles selected by means of a set
of radio buttons.
The appearance of the clue text may be further varied by means of a set of four Clue Alignment
radio buttons. The options are Align Left, Align Center, Align Right, and Justify.
The width of the lines used to draw the puzzle can be varied using the Line Width control.
Line widths are expressed as a percentage of the width of a puzzle cell, and may be selected from the combo box within the range 1% to 10%.
The normal Arrowword standard is that all arrows will point either down or to the right, and by default, this is the result that
Magnum Opus will strive to achieve. However, depending on the design of the puzzle grid, it is not always possible. Magnum Opus allows you to relax this
rule so that some of the arrows point up or to the left. This relaxation is achieved by unchecking the Use L-R and DOWN arrows only
checkbox. In some cases it may still not be possible for the design to be completed, in which case an appropriate message will be generated.
By default, Arrow-word clues are printed using normal font. The size of the font actually used is selected by the program as the largest
font which will allow all of the clues to be fitted into the limited space available to them. The controlling factor in this selection process will be the length
of the longest word in any of the clues, and this will often mean that quite a small font will be used. There is nothing that can be done about this, but if you
want to add extra emphasis to the clues, you can request that they be printed using a Bold font by selecting the Print clues using Bold
characters checkbox.
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