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.

What Does It Do?

• Develop crossword tableaux,
• Punch out new puzzles, using these tableaux,
• Perform optimized recursive lookups to fill the cells in these puzzles,
• Besides this "normal" general word-fill lookup, three other kinds of specialized lookups are supported: "crazy about" strings (eg., "ant" in "mercantile"), "capsules" (where one cell can hold 2 or more characters), and "lexical weighing", where you can create topical puzzles with a high-percentage of selected, topical, subject-matter, words.
• Interact with a running lookup, to handle undesirable words, push the lookup forward, or halt it altogether.
• Obtain clues for the words/phrases in the puzzle from a large database of historical clues, define new clues, and eventually fold your new clue work into the database.
• Write out your new crossword puzzle, in HTML and PUZ (AcrossLite) formats.
• Perform system-related maintenance, such as lexicon upkeep.
• Much more!

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. It's been a couple of versions since the last update, so you see notes for two versions here:

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VERSION 2.08 - Tue 11/15/2011 23:05:38

Added '-worduse' option to Info. This lets you query to find which
archived or currently active puzzles contain a certain word or words.

Added infrastructure to support querying the word base of both
archived and active puzzles.

Added '-suppress' (warning messages) option to sgrep.

Simplified formatting of canned clue output; this should trigger
significantly more columnating and better use of the console real
estate.

Fix docs for -addtotrash option of the GLob command.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Anyway, have at it!:

• Download putz, version 2.08