Installation

The installation procedures assume you've installed the prerequsites of the Java Runtime Environment 1.2

You'll also need to create a directory from where you'll run Scrabaid, and put its indexes and wordlists. These instructions will assume that you've changed to that directory before running any of the java programs.

The jar file

You can obtain the jar file from Scrabaid's Sourceforge page http://sourceforge.net/projects/scrabaid/. Add a reference to the jar file to your classpath. For example, if you put the scrabaid.jar file in c:\scrabaid, you'd add it to your classpath by typing this from the command line:

set CLASSPATH=c:\scrabaid\scrabaid.jar;%CLASSPATH%

Getting a word list

The next step in installation is to get a word list. English word lists can be obtained from various places. The Scrabaid download page contains a file word.lst, whose description reads:

The Enhanced North American Benchmark LEexicon package provides a 173,000+ word standardized tournament-level master list

For convenience, you can download the ENABLE2K wordlist from the Scrabaid download page. The ENABLE2k webpage can be found at: http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/software.html

Other wordlists can be found at http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/

Once obtaining your word list and copying it to a directory, change to your scrabaid directory, and type:

java WordListGenerator WORD.LST

This will generate Scrabaid's wordlists based on the "master" word list. Note that in the example, WORD.LST is the name of the word list.

Generating indexes

Generating the indexes can take several hours, depending on the maximum length of searchable words you choose. You may choose to only search words up to 10 characters in length if you're short on disk space, or go for the full 15 letter words if you have the space. Personally, I search up to 13 character words; the probability of encountering a 15 letter word in Scrabble is very low.

Index generation may require a lot of memory too. I generate my indexes using a 150 MB JVM, so I'd type:

java -Xmx150m TableGenerator 13

If you have less memory you can try a 100 Meg JVM:

java -Xmx100m TableGenerator 13 2500000

Running Scrabaid

Once the installation process is complete you can run Scrabaid by typing

java Scrabaid

and you'll be beating your opponents in no time.