Crossword-making software - is there such a thing?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve got an upcoming family holiday in a few days. It’s popped into my head that it might be fun to create a crossword, with clues based on family lore (example: “thing that Dad fell into in France, (5)”. DITCH). I reckon I could set it up so that no one person could solve all the clues; they’d have to work together to solve it.

I’ve only done this sort of thing once before, and back then I designed the crossword from scratch, writing out the clues in Excel and then using a drawing package to create the actual grid. That was a lot of work though, and I don’t have a huge amount of time.

Are there any software packages where I can define the clues and answers, and then it automates the layout of the grid and produces the puzzle? It would need to be web-based, or run on MacOS, iPhone or iPad, and I’d need to be able either to print out the crossword or share a link to an online version. It would be good if it could create an answer sheet as well. I don’t mind paying a small amount but this is a one-off so lower cost is better.

Thanks.

2

Skeleton-style puzzles (also known as Kriss-Kross puzzles) aren’t too difficult to make up yourself. I’ve done a few over the years (and once wrote a program to solve them). They look generally like this:

Normally, they don’t have clues like the above example does. They just have a list of words (grouped by length) that go in the puzzle, and you have to figure out which word goes where.

3

A search for ‘free crossword maker’ should throw up some possibilities.

Here’s one: Crossword Puzzle Maker | World Famous from The Teacher's Corner

4

Those aren’t real crossword puzzles though. I wasn’t able to find one recently when I looked for it. I tried to write one, but it’s kind of a hard puzzle to solve and I couldn’t make it work (yet).

5

For what the OP wants to do, something like what @bob_2 linked to may be the way to go. But if you’re interested in what the pros use, I found this New York Times Crossword Constructor Resource Guide:

6

Thanks everyone. Plenty to look through in those replies.

7

I wrote a crossword setter in the past for fun using Python.

The first version added word delimiters randomly and then filled the puzzle recursively. It worked ok up to a 6x6 or 7x7 grid, but then took too long.

The second version started with a puzzle template and could fill it without recursion (provided a large dictionary). This worked a lot better because once you fill the big words, you just have multiple, smaller puzzles.

I never got to the more labor intensive parts: pruning and prioritizing the dictionary of possible words and then creating a database of clues for the words in the dictionary.

At the time I didn’t find any crossword building programs which surprised me. I did do a search again today and say this one. I haven’t used it and can’t speak to its quality or safety. I’m a little bit leery of projects on sourceforge.