I wrote it using an excellent scripting language called "tcl".

Working on this thing became something of an obsession. Originally, I didn't undertake to implement a GUI (Graphic User Interface), although in version 1.06 I snuck in a little pushbutton interface to facilitate lookup monitoring, and since then have started GUIfying operations when doing so genuinely improves the usability. Perhaps this interest in GUIfying things will become a trend, until the whole darned thing has a graphical front end! Wouldn't that be something....

Nonetheless, most interaction is still via a command line interface. If that doesn't bother you, consider picking it up and using it!

Here's an Emacs screenshot showing some output, and a prompt:

...and here's an Emacs screenshot showing some results from a lookup:

Well, in the end—it seems to me, anyway—the real test of a puzzle is in the clues. Putz now has a pretty comprehensive built-in clue database (217K+) clues for 27K+ words on tap), but I still feel a need to come up with my own from time to time, and inventing clever ones is a bit of an art form.

That said, you're welcome to try out some of my puzzles, and comments are certainly welcome!

You can see my puzzles here.

How Do You Use It?

Following is the latest release.

Note: I haven't tested it on Unix-y systems, so I don't know about ease-of-installation, or perhaps knottier technical issues. I hope to look at those soon.

While I haven't tested it on anything besides Windoze™, bear in mind it uses tcl in a very vanilla way. It should run anywhere tcl can run.

And here are the latest release notes:

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VERSION 1.35 - Fri 07/30/2010 11:14:04.37

The title of the Lookup Monitor window and icon/taskbar tab now
contains the number of solutions. This lets you monitor progress
without having to maximize the window.

Renamed the "putzInt" Lookup Monitor interface to "putzMon". This
feels more intuitive.

Had to rename "Monitorfontsize" to "MONFontsize", so the unique prefix
doesn't become overlarge, what with the introduction of the
"MONRefreshtimeout" SEt var.

Added new "MONRefreshtimeout" SEt var. You set this to a number of
seconds, and the Lookup Monitor automatically refreshes repeatedly
after that many seconds. Very nice! When you get sick of pressing the
SPACE bar to refresh the Monitor, this takes over and you can keep
tabs on the progress, without incurring too much overhead! Very nice.

Removed "CONT" from the Lookup Monitor; no one in their right mind
would use it; it consumes unacceptable CPU cycles in interface
updates.

Added a little adjunct window to the "Tableaurasa" tk app. It now
shows a little statistical info on each tableau; the number of
cellRefs of each available length. This makes it easier to search for
tableaux that must have cellRefs of certain length; such as for
thematic puzzles with specialized lex.

Added "#remove" macro command to *.plex files. This makes it possible
to hack and hew at the in-memory lex a little more cleverly. For
example, if you're working on a puzzle with two long, phrasal fills
(21-character-long sentential fill), you can use the "#remove" macro
with the 21-character glob ("?????????????????????") to remove all
21-character lex, then "#include" a special lex file that contains
only the desired 21-character sentential fill. That way, the desired
long fill doesn't contain irrelevant, undesired stuff, and you can
actually include the 21-character wordref in a lookup domain, rather
than hand-filling the 21-character wordref, and hoping for the best.

Fixed small problem with the RMPuzzle command mistakenly resetting the
prompt even whe the current puzzle does NOT get deleted.

Added '-d[ump]' option to the DIRSolcols command. This generates a
*.ptxt file, which is an extracted collection of solutions from the
solutions files, based on the currently loaded collection. This can be
manually riffled through to find a desired solution for the current
lookup domain. I created this facility when I realized that
occasionally one of these collections is just too big to list on the
console. The "RMSolutions -e[ntire]" command now also looks for this
file and exterpates it.

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Anyway, have at it!:

• Download putz, version 1.35