Changing the Board Appearance

You can change the board and number/piece appearance in MaaTec Sudoku. You can always select the Standard Board in the View menu. This may happen automatically when you change the Sudoku size. The standard board is resized together with the application window and you can use the Settings dialog (see Edit menu) to change the displayed characters, the font, the font size, and the colors.

The Setup will also install the 'MaaTec Sudoku' font into the Windows fonts folder. You can select this font for the standard board to play and print Sudokus with a size of up to 25x25 cells with two-digit numbers instead of letters. If you used the manual installation, you can download the font from the MaaTec website.

The Load Board... command in the View menu opens a dialog that allows to select different graphics for the Sudoku board and pieces. The selection is confined to boards for the currently selected Sudoku size. You can download new graphics from the MaaTec website or create your own.

To change the size of the Sudoku, open the Board Size (Standard) submenu  in the View menu and choose the desired size. Currently the sizes 4x4, 9x9, 16x16, 25x25, and 36x36 are supported. Since version 1.2 of the Sudoku application, you can also open the Other Boards submenu to select boards with non-square hemmed areas. This allows Sudokus of almost any size, e.g. 5x5, 8x8, or 12x12. The content of this submenu is not fixed and may be extended by installing new board pattern files from the MaaTec website.

Creating your own board graphics

The application can import images in the formats bitmap (bmp), JPEG (jpg), and PNG. For board and preview JPEG is the best format as the image files are relatively small. For pieces graphics the PNG 32-bit or 8-bit format with alpha transparency is recommended for best quality. You need to save your image files in the 'Boards' sub-directory in your installation directory. You can use the board graphics there as examples.

The pieces files need to contain four rows of pieces and empty cells. Thus a pieces file for 9x9 Sudokus needs to contain four rows with at least 10 cells. The cells to the left contain marker graphics the other cells the digits from 1 to 9 or anything else that appeals to you. The first row contains the pieces that are placed by the user, the second row contains the graphics for fixed pieces that are visible when a new game starts and that cannot be changed by the user. The third and fourth row also contain user placeable and fixed pieces but with 'fault marking'. These graphics will be used to mark pieces that are placed against the rules (e.g. identical numbers in the same row). The left cell of the first row must be empty. The left cell of the second row contains the mark that is drawn below the selected piece in the selection bar. The left cell in the third row contains the Hint mark. And finally the left cell in the fourth row contains the mark for the Mark False Pieces command in the Help menu. This is drawn above the marked pieces.

To use your graphics in the MaaTec Sudoku application, you will also need to create a board file. This is a simple text file with the extension 'board'. You can use one of the existing files as template. The board files resemble Windows INI files and need to contain at least two sections, namely [Board] and [EN]. The [EN] section needs to contain at least the line 'Name=board name' with the English name of your board. But you should also add the 'Description' parameter with a short description of your board in English. Name and description are used in the Load Board dialog. You can add additional sections for other languages with the corresponding language code as section name (e.g. [DE] for German).

The [Board] section has following parameters: