INSTALLATION

If the GNU autoconfiguration system is available, just do:

./configure
make
make install

More detailed instructions can be found in INSTALL.

If autoconfiguration is not available, try:

cp /dev/null config.h
cc -c scrabdes.c
cc -o scrabdes scrabdes.o -lm

If this is successful, copy the resulting executable scrabdes
to a directory in your path.

USAGE

Your input file should contain only characters that you want to put on
tiles. You should therefore strip it of punctuation, whitespace, numbers
and so forth unless you want them to be included. You will probably
also want to remove case-distinctions.

On Unix systems the following script will pre-process a wordlist or text
as above:

cat "your input filename" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -cd '[a-z]' > "cleaned up input"

This first converts upper-case letters to lower-case, then removes everything
other than lower-case letters.

Sometimes it is not possible to find a design using the
specified number of tiles. If you are willing to use a different
number of tiles, try some other target numbers.  Otherwise, if
you insist on a particular number of tiles, you should increase
or decrease the target one-by-one until it converges.  This will
provide an approximate design, which you can adjust manually.

First, look at the token counts. The program assumes that every
character should be represented. Characters whose frequency is
so low that the rounded tile count is 0 are assigned a single
tile.  Sometimes very rare characters are errors. In other
cases, they represent sounds found only in a few loanwords. If
you find errors or loan characters that you wish to exclude,
eliminate them from the input file and run the program again.

If this does not produce convergence, you will have to make use
of a suboptimal design. The best candidates for a change in tile
count are those whose fractional tile count has a fractional
part close to 0.5, since rounding these values in the "wrong"
direction will produce the least deviation from a perfect
design.
