Word search books

A word search book is a layout book whose pages are generated from word lists. You write the lists; the app places the words, fills the grid, prints the word bank, and builds the answer key.

There is no AI art step. A letter grid is arithmetic, not illustration, and charging image credits for one would be absurd — the only thing you can spend credits on here is an optional page border.

Writing the lists

Each page carries its own list, in the Words on the page field of the page plan. Separate words however you like — spaces, commas, one per line, all three at once.

Three rules decide what survives:

• Six to eight letters. Shorter words hide badly in a grid and longer ones crowd it out. Both bounds are settings.
• Letters only. No spaces, hyphens or apostrophes — a word search cannot hide a word with a space in it.
• No word spelled inside another. CANDLE inside CANDLES makes the answer key ambiguous, so one of them goes.

Anything dropped is reported with the reason, page by page. The word bank that prints is the vetted list, so the page is always solvable — a bank naming a word the grid does not contain is the one defect a solver cannot work around.

Importing a file

⬆ Import word lists takes a plain text file, one page per block:

Frost and Firelight
MITTENS CHIMNEY KINDLED HEARTHS BLANKET FLICKER

The Long Dark
LANTERN SHADOWS SILENCE STARLIT DRIFTED QUIETLY

A line on its own is a page name; the words follow it. The importer tells you what it read before it changes anything, and names any block it could not use.

Generating the puzzles

✦ Generate puzzles fills every page that has words. It is deterministic: the same page regenerates the same grid, every time, because the grid is seeded from the page's own identity. Regenerating a finished book redraws it exactly as it was — which is what a book that has already been proofed requires.

Settings that apply to the whole book

That last one is worth turning on for anything longer than a few puzzles. A solver who meets the same word on page 3 and again on page 40 notices, and a long book that reuses its vocabulary feels padded. It is enforced while the book is built rather than left to you to police: words are claimed in page order, so a word used on page 3 is not available on page 40. A word that could not be placed is never claimed.

The answer key

Solutions print as their own section at the back, in either of two styles:

• Highlighted draws a band through each word, on the grid as printed. This is what most published keys do and it is readable at a glance. Two solutions across a page.
• Dotted blanks the filler letters to dots, leaving only the answers. Denser — three across a page — and it photocopies cleanly.

Neither is "the" right answer, which is why both ship. Switch between them and the section is rebuilt in place; turn the key off and it is removed entirely.

Solutions are taken from the grids as they were generated, never re-solved. A second search over the same list can legitimately find a word somewhere else, and a key that disagrees with the printed grid is worse than no key at all.

Each solution is numbered to match the puzzle's own footer, so "Puzzle 7" in the key and the page labelled 7 are the same page.

A border on every page

✦ Draw a page border generates one piece of themed line art and prints it on every page of the book — 2 credits, once, however long the book is. Describe the theme in your own words ("autumn leaves, acorns and small birds").

Some things worth knowing before you spend:

• The puzzle sits on a clean panel over the art, so the frame can never make a grid or a word list hard to read.
• Bleed is turned on for you. A frame that runs to the edge of the paper needs it, or the printer trims into the border on every page.
• It belongs to the book, not to a layout. Change layout, add an answer key, redesign a page — the border stays.
• ↻ Redraw costs another 2 credits and replaces it. Remove is free.
• The generated art is around 1000 pixels square, which on a full page is well under 300 DPI, so the release board will flag it as soft. That is honest rather than alarming: line art at that size prints acceptably, but you should know before you approve a proof.

Choosing a layout

Five puzzle layouts ship, and they differ in furniture rather than in geometry — the grid is square and centred in all of them, because a puzzle whose cells are taller than they are wide reads as a mistake.

The two solution layouts are offered only when you are editing an answer-key page, so a solution layout can never land on a puzzle.

⚠️ The grid is set in a fixed-pitch face and that is not a style choice. A cell is exactly one character wide; in a proportional face an I is narrower than a W and the columns bend. Changing the grid's font or dragging its box narrower is the one edit the page designer will not let you make freely.