I have dabbled in Cryptic Crosswords on and off since I was a teenager. I was never any good, only finished a handful in years of trying. But in November 2008 I slipped on a greasy tree root whilst walking Arry and managed to break my right leg in quite spectacular fashion, fibia as well as tibia in 3 places. On coming out of hospital, I couldn't get comfy enough to concentrate on my other on-line passion, Poker, so I was looking for something else to do.

And so it was that whilst helping Maureen with her Times crossword, it dawned on me to search the web and see what I could find. I found tons of stuff. In particular I found that several U.K. newspapers published their Cryptic Crosswords on-line complete with software which allows on-line solving. So that was what I started doing.

After several months I became far better at solving than I was, to the extent that there are some of the Guardian's setters I actually expect to complete. That improvement was assisted by the good people of Fifteen Squared, a daily set of blogs giving, and discussing, the solutions to all the major freely published newspaper puzzles.

Then, I was talking on the phone to a fellow CWR volunteer when he mentioned that a) the magazine editor was short of material and that b) he had thought of submitting a crossword once before but couldn't finish the construction. Hmmm I thought.

So, I searched the web for crossword software. I didn't want to pay for it because I was only intending doing the one puzzle, just to help our editor out, hence my search was restricted to the freebies. A word to the wise, most freebies can be ignored. They presume that any old grid design will do, hence you create a list of clues and answers and the clever software fits it into a grid. If you want to stick to the grid rules of the major newspapers, this is a totally useless approach, and if you are doing cryptics, sticking to those rules is a very good way of ensuring a fair grid.

I did find a couple of primitive tools that each did part of the job. I even went to the extent of writing a wrapper program which attempted to assist in using those two programs in combination! It was all rather clunky and unsatisfactory, but it was better than nothing!.

Then a friend on Fifteen Squared  asked if I had seen Crossword Compiler. Now this is NOT the famous one that costs money, this is from Spoonbill Software. Now this was, IMHO, a pretty fine application with the advantage of producing Across Lite files! Sadly, that version (4) still didn't allow all the sort of output I wanted. So I created another gadget to fill the gap. However, having susequently had some fruitful conversations with Mr. Spoonbill himself, (and assisting with the beta-testing!), there is now a new release of S.C.C. with all that I ever wanted included. Thank you Ian, job well done.