Program Japan Crosswords

This program allows to create and solve multi-colored japanese crosswords. I decided to write this program because I could not find such a program anywhere in the Internet! All of the programs I found were very inconvenient for me, most of them allowed to work only with one-colored crosswords, others programs could not solve crosswords automatically… Besides, all these programs had different file formats for crossword editing and solving, and converting between them sometimes was very inconvenient (in some of them I could not even find how to do it at all).

Of course, that was long time ago; now there are hundreds of such programs, so you can choose between them. My program allows to work with crosswords with up to 16 arbitrary colors; it can solve them automatically and has possibility to find all solutions for ambiguous crosswords. Its original format (JCC) supports saving not only numbers (as in many programs), but also the picture, and this allows to save your work and continue solving at any time. Also it supports several other formats that are used frequently for saving japanese crosswords. And this program is absolutely free!

If you want, you can help me with your bug-reports and wish-requests. It is very important for me — about half of all program's features were born from users' wish requests. So don't be shy! :-) Even if I will not be able to implement your suggestion, I will know that this feature is needed and will try to make something about it.

Currently, the two branches of the program exist. The old 3.x was developed using IDE Visual C++ 6.0; its advantage is that the program does not require additional DLL files: all necessary libraries are present in any operating system version beginning from Windows 98. But there are also drawbacks, that's why the 3.x branch is no longer in development (the latest version available is 3.2). The next, more modern branch 5.x is developed in Visual C++ .NET 2003. It allowed me virtually without any effort implement context help in HTML format, and also automatically fixed some minor problems (like glitches at the edge of toolbars in XP style), but this version requires additional DLL libraries that can be downloaded here.

Download links:

	Category	Version	Size	Download
	Branch 5.x	5.3	315 824 bytes
		5.2	251 421 bytes
	Branch 3.x	3.2	252 494 bytes
		2.5	84 419 bytes

For translators

Beginning with version 5.2/3.2, the program became multilingual, and everyone can add his own language or alternative translation. The localization is stored in the DLL file which includes all the dialogs, text messages, menus, etc. For adding your own language, just download the project by the appropriate download link below, modify it as you wish and add the resultant DLL into the program directory. On opening the settings dialog, the program scans its directory and searches language files, then allows to change the language into on of the found ones. The file name should be UI_Lang.dll, where Lang is replaced with the language name (for example, UI_English.dll).

In the archive you will find the ready project for IDE Visual C++. It is enought to translate only the file Japan.rc and compile the project. Of course, you can change all other files as well, but for usual localizations this is not necessary. Please, keep in mind that I did not implement protection from incorrect or missing resources (this would complicate the code and could make the program work slower), so in case of such bugs my program may stop working.

If you wish to use IDE other than Visual C++, please, keep in mind that you need to perform linking with option /NOENTRY, else you will get an error. (In the project for Visual C++ this option is specified already.) Alternatively, you can use usual resource editors, modifying all the text directly in the compiled UI_Lang.dll file. And, finally, you can translate Japan.rc by hand in any text editor (its structure is very simple) and send this file to me, and I will compile it and put onto my site for downloading.

Download links:

	Category	Version	Size	Download
	Branch 5.x	5.3	26 592 bytes
		5.2	28 838 bytes
	Branch 3.x	3.2	28 354 bytes