International Crosswords

International Crosswords is a free and useful utility that can create online crosswords in any language. It's primary purpose is to allow educators to create crosswords for students learning another language. It is a useful tool for creating challenging and fun exercises to help re-inforce each lesson. Remembering word lists can be a little easier when you make it into a game.

It can also be used to create crosswords just for fun. For an example please take a look at this crossword created using the English alphabet. Included with the package are files to allow you to use the Greek and Esperanto alphabet as well. Custom language alphabet files can be easily created, instructions are included.

1. Open the file "config.pl". Here you will be able to set a number of key factors necessary to run the program. Most of it is already explained in the file. A couple of points:

- The $config{'alphabet'} variable points to the default alphabet file. Only 3 alphabets are included with the Mongwell International Crosswords package: Greek, English, and Esperanto. You may create your own alphabet file easily. All you need to do is create a list of the HTML codes necessary to display the language's alphabet.

The lines of the file need to be set into a key=value format. The key is an alphanumeric representation of the letter (it doesn't matter what you use here, just as long as you don't use the same one twice). The value is the HTML code that displays that character. For example, here are a few lines from the Greek alphabet:

Alpha=Α Beta=Β Gamma=Γ

- The $config{'docpath'} variable can usually be left as is unless you either make it so that the name of the directory is not "crosswords" right underneath the base HTML directory, or your server is set up in such a way that the cgi-bin directory is not directly underneath the base HTML directory. You can either change it to point to the absolute path to the directory or modify the relative directory to fit your directory structure.

2. Upload viewer.cgi, maker.cgi, config.pl, and the alphabet file that you will be using to your directory under cgi-bin. We recommend using cgi-bin/cwords, however you may use any directory name you wish. Make sure to set the attributes of maker.cgi and viewer.cgi to 755.

3. Create your document path directory structure under the base HTML directory. We recommend using the directory "/crosswords". The name may be whatever you like, however, it's path must be properly set in the config.pl file.