WOYWW 219 – word search info

14/08/2013 by UKMA 30 Comments

OK, so I managed to capture all I think you need for this.  But first, a remarkably tidy desk for WOYWW this week!

The process for creating a Word Search background for any use is way easier than you might think. What I use is this link – geared towards teachers, it allows you to create a word search grid simply by filling in the options online.

There is flexibility here, but this is what I did. On the menu screen I changed things to suit me.  Just added a random word and selected COLORS for the word list.  You have to pick SOMETHING in order to create a grid, it won’t let you create just a grid of random characters.  So far as I can tell this just adds the one word to the grid.  It might be interesting to add a list of RELATED words in the CHOOSE YOUR OWN WORDS section and NOT tick the EXISTING WORD LIST. In the generated grid, ones that you type will appear in the grid but not be highlighted unless you change the colour of them.  Imagine  I LOVE YOU highlighted, but other love related words there in the grid – SWEETIE, KISS, HUGS, ADORE, etc. Then the recipient will “see” them even if they aren’t the focus IYKWIM.  I would select FORWARD WORDS ONLY cause backwards ones may not be even marginally noticeable.  I edited the original grid and I didn’t want a lot of actual words in there, but thinking on it,  it might be cool.

I make a few other changes – I make the grid 15 x 25 (or 25 x 15 depending if I want landscape or portrait orientation) and select lower case and Verdana for the font.  That really doesn’t matter as I change the font in my program anyway. Comic Sans is the default and I blinkin’ HATE Comic Sans.  If you wanted to create a grid with actual words you can make the changes on the right, to forward only words, for example.  But again, as I edit it anyway you don’t really need to. This is what you get:

One cool thing is you can copy and past the grid as INDIVIDUAL characters and NOT as an IMAGE of the grid. That makes each character totally editable.  Just selecting them grid to COPY>Paste you can see that:

All I do is then paste THAT into my program then change the font to a monospaced one.  I used Cousine.  I then select the letters to change and to make the words I want to use as the sentiment:

Obviously this is personal preference but I usually make the letters all a medium grey,  so the words (in this case THINKING OF YOU with OF and YOU intersecting) really stand out when I make those letters both BOLD and the colour I want.  One word of caution – I mentioned  it above, but make sure you select a MONOSPACED font.  This means that each character takes up exactly the same space within its block and is placed in the block in the centre.  That means they will all line up as a perfect grid.  Non monospaced fonts won’t!

NEW INFO!  PSE spaces the characters differently than my program does.  Making the text bold makes the letters not line up perfectly.  PSE doesn’t have kerning so other than changing the point size of the SPACES between the letters, space by space, I don’t know how you would do this in PSE.  BUT Ifa, on UKS gave this a go and tells me that you can do it in Word on a PC and the spacing stays the same.  I’ll try to see if I can push DS off his gaming PC and give it a go.

You can make the grid fit an area in a couple of different ways – either create a much larger grid then select just the dimensions you need (say 4 x 6 for a card topper, or 3 x 4 for a Project  Life  printable) OR mess about with the font size, so it fills the space,  or tile the grid if you wanted to fill a 12 x 12 scrapbook page!

I had a thought.  I will go ahead and add the card toppers I created as  PDFs for you.  If you like the idea but don’t want to go thru the steps to create your own, you can use these.

Portrait orientation, JUST A NOTE PDF

Landscape Orientation, THINKING of YOU PDF

I ‘ll also add them as a .png – that will allow you to edit the colour, but I tried and you can’t edit the text as text. You can resize them.

Portrait orientation, JUST A NOTE PNG

Landscape Orientation, THINKING of YOU PNG

Just click ENHANCE > Adjust color > Adjust Hue/Saturation then tick COLORIZE and use the sliders to change to a colour you like.

From there it’s simple…or is it?  It IS simple but takes a few photo to explain so as this is already way longer than a usual WOYWW post I think I’d better save that bit for tomorrow.  Maybe by then I will have some different samples to show you.  Can’t wait? If I say MASKING, will that be enough info for you to have a go yourself? Probably …..

Here is a card from yesterday for you so you can see what it looks like all in this post:

Happy WOYWW!