XPaint Files

XScrabble - X version of the popular board game, for 1 to 4 players.
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1. Description

Xscrabble allows you to play Scrabble (TM) on your Linux/Unix box, provided
ad hoc dictionary and language files are installed. Allows single, duplicate
and multi-player games, possibly against the computer. Currently only
English and French are available.

Xscrabble uses the very old fashioned Xaw toolkit, but still works well, and
only requires the basic X11 libraries to be installed. It is preconfigured
with the option of using small, medium and large size boards (large is
recommended for modern hardware, especially HiDPI screens !)

Creation of a new language would minimally require just a list of words
and minor changes in the first lines of the
  XScrabble_en
app-defaults file, in order to load the appropriate dictionary and
set the alphabet and the value of letters. (The current version only
supports languages using a subset of the 26 Latin letters A-Z)

A more complete localisation would require translating all strings used
for the GUI, and eventually providing a file detailing the rules of
the game.


2. Preparation:
First edit the top of the 'build' script to adapt the installation
directories according to your needs.


3. Compilation

To build:
	./build bin

There are two directories of source code. The first to be built is part of
Xc, the Control Panel Widget Set, v 1.3, copyright 1992 by Paul D.
Johnston.  The second is the main XScrabble code. This also contains the
BarGraf widget from the Free Widget Foundation.

If all goes well, you should have two executables,
   xscrabble, xscrabble.board
in the src/ directory.


4. To install:
        ./build install (installs binaries and main app-default file)
	./build lang XX (for any of the languages you'd like to have)
Currently available packages (dictionaries, score and rules files) are 
English and French:
   xscrabble_en.tar.bz2
   xscrabble_fr.tar.bz2
These packages must be downloaded along with the main package
xscrabble-2.xx.tgz, which only contains the source code for the
binary programs.
 
The automatic installation only works if these packages are in the
same subdirectory as the xscrabble-X.XX source directory from which
you run the 'build' script. The language by default is the last
language that has been installed (as usual, packages may actually be
reinstalled several times without any trouble... reinstalling will
just overwrite the previously installed files.)


5. To clean everything:
	./build clean


6. To run:

Simply type xscrabble. This will bring up the setup box which will allow
you to enter the language, names and displays and other info for the
game to wish to play. Then click on the Start Game button, (or Load 
Previous if you're restarting a game). The main program, xscrabble.board,
will then be automatically called with the appropriate options.


7. Saving positions in the course of a game

The position of tiles on the board, the letters attributed to the players
and the tiles left in the bag are saved after every turn (in
'~/.xscrabble.save' of the person running 'xscrabble') and, after quitting
the program in the course of a game, can be reloaded later by running
xscrabble and hitting the 'Load Previous' button. The game will then
restart as if there had been no interruption. If another game is started
instead, the previously interrupted game is archived in a file
'~/.xscrabble.save.XXXXXXXXXX', where the last ten characters indicate
the time when the game was started.

Have fun!


Original author:
Matt Chapman.
E-mail: matt@belgarath.demon.co.uk (no longer csuoq@csv.warwick.ac.uk)
Web page: http://www.belgarath.demon.co.uk/
Version 1.00: March 1997 (original version Nov 1994)
(Added in the release notes of version 1.00:
This was a student project, and there are not likely to be any future
releases.)


Current maintainer:
Jean-Pierre Demailly
E-mail: jean-pierre.demailly@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
Version 2.00: March 1998 (multilingual version) 
Version 2.10: July 2000  (bug fixes; improvements & automatic install)
...
Version 2.13: May 2020   (this version with many improvements)


Xscrabble can now be downloaded from Sourceforge, at

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sf-xpaint/files/xscrabble/