The most obvious feature of American style crosswords is the fact that every letter in the puzzle is an interlinking letter. In other words, every letter in the puzzle is a letter in an across word, and also in a down word. In some ways, this make the puzzle easier to solve. If you are having difficulty with a word, you can expect some assistance as you solve those words which intersect with it. On the other hand, it also makes the puzzle considerably harder to construct. Even so, Crossword Express will generally have no trouble completing the construction if you use a dictionary of sufficient size. The English dictionary provided with the program contains well over 30,000 words, each having one or more clues.
In some ways, a British style crossword puzzle is the complete opposite of an American puzzle. Typically, there will be many more pattern cells in the puzzle, and only around one third of the letters will interlink. This makes the puzzle much easier to construct, and as you might expect it is correspondingly more difficult to solve.
This graphic demonstrates a feature of Crossword Express which allows the pattern cells to be printed in various shades of gray (or any other colour for that matter). You might want to do this for aesthetic reasons, or perhaps to conserve ink. The colour used for the letters and for the grid lines is similarly selectable.
School teachers find that a student's learning experience is powerfully reinforced if a revision test for vocabulary, history etc. is presented as a freeform crossword instead of as a simple list of questions. As few as a dozen words and clues can be quickly typed into a dictionary which is then used to make the puzzle. The dictionary is retained on the computer's hard drive until the next time it is needed.
This graphic demonstrates a feature of Crossword Express which is especially useful for printing puzzles having a large number of pattern cells. The appearance of the puzzle is much more appealing if the pattern cells are not printed at all, and instead an offset "shadow" is printed behind the puzzle. This is done simply by selecting a pattern cell colour of pure white.
Crosswords made by Crossword Express don't have to be square or even rectangular. This is achieved by defining a new type of cell, in addition to the active cells and pattern cells found in standard crosswords. The new type is called a Null cell, and can be included in any grid which you design using the Lattice Maintenance function.
Its most important feature is that it is not printed, thereby leaving a gap in the printed puzzle. Null cells can be combined together in any combination to produce any shape you desire.
In a standard crossword, when a word encounters a pattern cell, it signals the end of that word. Bar cells also signal the end of a word, but they still allow a letter to be included in the cell. There are three types of bar cells:-
Wall These terminate an Across word.
Floor These terminate a Down word.
Corner These will terminate both an Across word and a Down word.
A tunnel cell is a pattern cell in which two of the sides of the cell are connected by means of a tunnel. Any word which encounters such a tunnel will continue on its way from the other end of that tunnel.
This allows for the possibility that the word may change its direction one or more times. Apart from the novelty value of such a feature, it also allows a word to be considerably longer than either the horizontal or vertical dimension of the puzzle.
There are six varieties of tunnel cell -- two which provide a straight through action, and four which cater for all possible changes of direction of the word.
In case you are wondering whether you can combine all of the above cell types into a single puzzle, the answer is of course Yes!
Design your grids with any combination of the available cell types, and Crossword Express will fill them with words for you.
Please bear in mind that there are certain logical rules which apply to the use of some of these cells, particularly tunnel cells. Crossword Express will normally warn you if you have broken any of these rules.
