AnagramCrossword1.5 Copyright Martin Mamo 1995 All Rights Reserved
AnagramCrossword1.5 should distributed without alteration. It is essentially freeware, but if you keep it for over 14 days, I'd like a postcard.
The hardware requirements are a 68020 processor or later and a 12 inch monitor or larger.
Firstly unlike the previous versions of this program, AnagramCrossword1.5 will load any dictionary in the form of one uncompressed, human-readable word per line. The program will warn you if the dictionary is too large to fit into the memory which has been allocated to AnagramCrossword1.5.
As most commercial dictionaries that come with word processors are in a compressed format, AnagramCrossword1.5 cannot be used with them.
I'd expect this product to be able to load in a foreign dictionary.
The program expects the dictionary to be in the same folder as itself.
This product can perform a number of different searches on the included dictionary.
2) The Crossword Search
As its name suggests this can help solve partially completed crosswords. If you know a solution starts with an a, ends with le and is 5 letters long, you would enter a??le. The program will then search the dictionary for all possibilities that match. It would return the below for this case.
addle
adele
agile
aisle
amble
ample
angle
ankle
apple
3) The Single-Word Anagram Search
This will see if the character string you have entered can be rearranged to form another word in the dictionary.
4) The Multiple-Word Anagram Search By Size Of Words Produced
For this you firstly enter a character string in. Then you enter in a set of numbers, separated by commas, that will specify the sizes of the words to be produced from a rearrangement of all or some of the letters in your character string. The sum of the sizes of the words have to be less than or equal to the number of characters in your string.
For example if you enter in JohnPrescottMP and then 8,4,2 the program will eventually produce:
contempt posh jr
5) The Multiple-Word Anagram Search By Number Of Words Produced
This search is less specific than the above. This one will rearrange the letters in your character string to form a set of words found in the dictionary. The program will start looking for one word that can be formed from the rearrangement of all the letters in your string. Then it will start looking for two words that can be formed, then three, then four and up to eight. However you can specify the starting number of words.
After you have entered the character string, the program will ask you to set the start number of words to be produced from it. Entering 2 or 3 is about right.
Then the program will ask you what size words it should leave out from the search. As one and two letter words aren't very interesting, specifying it shouldn't include words below 3 characters long is about right. However then you will miss out I, a, I'm etc.
* For both multiple-word anagram searches, it is sometimes a good idea to remove the characters i, m and a from the string, if they are present, before entering it in, as then you can put "I'm a" before anything the program generates. This is useful when you are anagramming peoples' names.
6) The Hidden-Word Search
This will go through the dictionary and print out all the single words that can be formed by a rearrangement of all or some of the letters in you string.
7) As the multiple-word anagram searches can sometimes take a long time to complete, there is an option to copy the screen output to disk. This option is ONLY available for the multiple-word anagram searches. The resultant file is called: Your Generated Anagrams
It is a text only file and can be opened by SimpleText/TeachText or any word-processor capable of importing text files.
For difficult multiple-word anagrams it is recommended that you switch this option on and leave the computer searching for an hour or two.
To prevent the possiblility of the program filling up your hard disk with anagrams, the program will only copy a maximum of 10000 anagrams to the file - at the most this should take up about 600K.
Beware each time you start a new multiple-word anagram search with this option on, the previous file will be overwritten.
Future work on this program may include adding a standard mac user interface and making the multiple-word anagram searches faster.
**** By the way at the moment, I'm looking for work as a computer programmer after I finish my course and so if anybody wants a programmer then please contact me. At the moment the majority of my programming is done on UNIX, not on Apple Macs. I have experience of C, Modula-3, a bit of occam and compiler writing on UNIX. ****
Martin Mamo
e-mail address (until October 1995): msm13@cus.cam.ac.uk
