SudokuSolver Forum

I have a puzzle that's a Samurai, and there are cages in the four outer boxes but no sums in those cages. Then there are some given clues throughout the puzzle.

The puzzle works. But the graphics! Is there any software I can use to draw this? Or will I have to work in Illustrator? I don't think it will work in Sudoku Solver. I can't find where the .exe file of JSudoku goes on my computer after I unzip it, so I can't use that.

Thanks,

Amy Grace

Normally (MS) Excel is a pretty good tool to draw these puzzles. But I don't know if there is any special feature in your puzzle which would be tricky to implement in Excel.

As for putting in the cages, there are 2 different approaches to go about it:

1. The easy way:

Just shade the cells of the cages in colours. If you select your colours well (e.g. good contrast between adjacent cages) it should be pretty easy for all to see. This is how people do for jigsaws but if your puzzle isn't jigsaw then there's nothing wrong to use the colours for the cages. The (only) drawback is colour-blinded people can't play the puzzle.

2. The harder way:

Namely the standard way to represent the cages - using dotted borders. I personally use a very small cell height/width (h=5 pts, w=0.5 pt) and then have each sudoku cell formed by 8x8 Excel cells. That way I can leave the middle 6x6 as the content and border the cages together. Another trick I employ is to do the puzzle pic in layers (e.g. one layer for Sudoku grid lines and another layer for cage structure), and then use MS Paint to overlap them together (copy and paste in "transparent mode"). That way the puzzle is prettier to look.


Are you sure you have downloaded the JSudoku.exe.zip file? The .exe file should be right there. Also you have to have Java on your machine. Are you sure you've got that?

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