Settings on new puzzles

These are the different parameters you can customize when creating a new puzzle:

If you want the full picture or a part of it.
The screen displays the image you selected. You may want to use only a part of it (if you copied the whole screen you will want to remove the frames and other stuff). To Crop the original image, click the mouse over some point in the picture and drag it. You'll see a rectangle that grows as you drag the mouse. The region inside will be the actual image of the new puzzle.
Once you have drawn a rectangle, you can move and resize it: Point the mouse over some border or corner and click+drag it.
If you want to remove the cropping rectangle simply click outside it.

Rotate the image if needed.
You may need to rotate the image, in this case right click the mouse over the picture and choose one of the two options for rotating.

The number of pieces on each level.
You can set how many pieces will have each level of the puzzle. (Filling these levels is optional. The puzzle will have as many predefined levels as you fill here up to 5).
At the right of each level the program display the actual number of pieces. This may be different from the value that you typed; the reason is that the program searches the nearest number that will give squared pieces (approximately equal width and height).

When you are changing some of these fields, a grid will be drawn in the picture to give you an idea of the size of the resulting pieces.

 No cheats :With that option checked the new puzzle won't allow cheating.

 Mystery : Puzzles created in this mode will not show the original image when playing the puzzle. It's fun to solve a puzzle when one doesn't know what it is (very challenging for kids).

Combining the non cheating with the mystery setting can make it very fun stuff for others at home to guess and play. Try making greeting messages or nice phrases and invite somebody to solve the puzzle.

There is also a  Custom level  checkable box: With this checked the new puzzle will allow typing the number of pieces when starting it.

 Title . The title of the puzzle that will be displayed in the gallery.

Text in the picture:
You can type richly formatted text in the picture. Click the button  Add text to the image  or right click the image and choose that option in the menu.
Once you have created some text, double click on it if you want to change it. Right clicking it will offer the option to erase the text.

See here detailed possibilities and instructions.

Shrinking/Stretching the picture
The program will show the image at the original size but maybe it is too large or too small; the  Zoom  slider allows reducing or enlarging the original image: Move the slider to the left to reduce or to the right to expand it in small increments.  Notice that some pictures will lose quality when they are stretched or shrunk.

The background
Some pictures have a definitely improved look depending on the background color of the screen so here you have the opportunity to set a great harmonic or contrasted color and a texture. The program defaults to a random color and texture. Suggestion: Check the next option  Preview , push  Background  and then press  Random  until you see a good combination. (In any case, once you load a puzzle you can still change the background while playing it). 

 Preview : Will build some pieces and show them as it will be in the regular game, this way you can test how they look with the background. The number of pieces displayed will be that of the level you lastly edited (so to test a specific number of pieces, click on the level as if you were to type in it and click on  Preview ).

 Save in Shelf : By default, the new puzzle will go to the current shelf (the shelf active last time you were in the gallery). The button  Change  allows setting a different shelf (or creating a new one), it will display the Gallery in a special mode allowing only to choose shelves or to create new ones.

Gift Puzzles: The program allows creating special Gift puzzles that can be distributed freely. Click the tab Gift (near the top of the settings) to switch to the mode for creating these. Click here to read about the Gift Puzzles.