Click the Applet options button in the Export interactive crossword window to customize the way the solving applet works. There are five pages of options:
Clue Layout
You can have the clues either to the left, right or below the grid.
Clue Font
Choose SanSerif or Times Roman. Exactly how the font will look will depend on which system the puzzle is being solved on.
Button Layout
Select whether you want the buttons to be displayed to the left of the grid or centred underneath the grid and clues.
Clue View
Set the Width (or height if the clue layout is set to Below grid) of the clue display. You should ensure that the longest clue easily fits in the clue view window, and that the clue view width isn’t so large that it won’t all be visible in the web page. Set the grid-clue gutter to determine the space between the grid and the clues, and between the clue views. Measurements are in pixels.
Show bar separators in collocations
Select this option to put a thick line between squares where there is a space in the solution. For example if a word was “top hat”, this option would put a thick line between the “p” and the “h”. You must have the word formats set correctly for this to work, and the setting is ignored if the puzzle you are exporting contains bars.
Numbers visible in grid
If this is selected the grid will be numbered as usual. If you have a large grid with a small square size the numbers may be hard to read or look messy, in which case you can deselect this option to hide the numbers. With interactive clues the numbers are redundant anyway since the user can find out immediately which clue belongs to which word slot.
Always show alphabet
Select this option to show the alphabet beneath the puzzle so that solvers can enter a letter by clicking on it with the mouse. This can be useful for foreign language puzzles as solvers may not have accented or Cyrillic characters on their keyboard. Change the alphabet (the letters shown) under Clue Properties. If you are exporting a coded puzzle the alphabet will always be shown regardless of this setting.
Button Captions
You can change the captions of the various buttons that the applet can show. This is useful if you want to change the captions to another language. You may also wish to change the English captions. For example, if you don’t implement the Save button, the Revert button may be better given the caption “Clear”, or if you implement the Reveal Letter button maybe you want to change “Reveal” to “Reveal Word”.
Graphical buttons
Check this box to use icons for the buttons. Otherwise, standard text buttons will be used.
Always use wide buttons
By default wide buttons are used only if one of the selected buttons has a long caption. Select this option to always use wide buttons. (Wide buttons are 20 pixels wider).
Limit cheats
Select this option to limit the number of times people can use the Reveal Letter or Reveal Word buttons.
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Save URL (Advanced users only)
Leave this blank to save the state of the puzzle in a cookie (default HTML5 applet only). Alternatively give the URL of the script to run when the Save button is clicked in the applet. The script will be passed a string representing the letters in the grid, with hyphens for blank letters. This string can then be used as the PROGRESS parameter for the applet to restore the solver’s progress. It is up to the script to manage how the saving process actually works.
The URLs can contain the %PROGRESS% placeholder which will be replaced by the progress string, and %TIME% as a placeholder for the solving time in seconds [Applicable only if the timer is shown].
Example: For a script called “saveme.cgi” at “https://www.crossword-compiler.com/cgi-bin” folder the Save URL might be “https://www.crossword-compiler.com/cgi-bin/saveme.cgi?%PROGRESS%”.
The Save URL is stored in the HTML file in the Applet’s “SAVE” parameter. It can thus be generated dynamically if required. Note that the Save URL may have to be on the same server as the .html file otherwise you may get a security violation.
Submit URL (Advanced users only)
The URL of the script to invoke when the solver presses the submit button. As for the save button the page is passed a string representation of the letters in the grid. The Submit URL is stored in the HTML file in the Applet’s “SUBMIT” parameter.
Select Use human-readable submit format if you would like the submit button to return text that is readily readable as a list of words entered in the grid (the words are separated by + signs). Otherwise, it uses a compact format which is just all the letters entered in the grid in the order left to right, top to bottom.
The URL can contain the %SUBMIT% placeholder which will be replaced by the submission string, and %TIME% which is replaced by the solving time in seconds [Applicable only if the timer is shown]. There is also a %MARKED% placeholder; this is like %SUBMIT% except that the solution string is preceded by a string of zeros and ones indicating the correctness of the solution words. Only use %MARKED% if you are using human-readable submit format, and have included solution information.
The %CHARSET% placeholder is replaced with the character set of the submitted information. This is either the character set of the grid font you selected when making the puzzle, or the charset specified by the OUTPUTCHARSET applet parameter.
Codebase
This gives the location of the Crossword Compiler applet code files. If these are not in the same folder as the .html file you need to change the codebase setting, otherwise it can be left blank. Note that the applet files must be on the same server as the web page.
You can change the colors used in the applet. Be careful using custom colors since these may not be available on the solver’s system. Check the Show wrong letters in box to show incorrect letters in a different color as they are typed in [the puzzle must include solution information for this to work].
Options at the bottom allow you to specify when the timer starts and if it can be paused, and an option controlling grid navigation in the solving applet.The applet can show a message or redirect to another web page when all the letters have been filled in the grid. Select the Solution must be correct box if you want to do this only if the solution is actually correct. (For this to work you must also select the Include solution information in file box in the Export window.) If you want no action to take place then just leave the completion message or web page blank.
Show completion message
Select this option to make the message appear when the solver has filled in the last blank square of the grid. It can contain several lines.
Go to web page
Select this option to redirect to a different web page when the puzzle is complete. Enter the full URL of the page you want to redirect to. The URL can contain placeholders as described under URLs above.
The title and copyright can be embedded in the applet so that they always show above and below the grid. Enter the text here if you wish to do this.
Puzzle grid sizes are determined by the square size you choose when you export an interactive puzzle. Some large puzzles may be too big to conveniently fit on screen, so instead the grid can appear in a scroll-box so that the solver only sees part of the grid at a time. Set the options on the Scrolling tab to fix a maximum size that you want to have. If the grid is then too large to fit in that size, scrollbars will be used.
For advanced manual customization options for the applet see the applet parameters topic.