Astham

Astham is a tool for creating anagrams (permutations of a string). For more information on anagrams in general (and examples of what you can accomplish with too much free time and too few friends) click here.

Then rearrange the letters using standard Windows mouse methods. Permutations can also be created with Permutation on the Edit menu.

To really unleash the power of Astham you need dictionaries (proprietary file format FZI or just plain text files with words). If you have access to such a dictionary you can use that file for generation of anagrams with the Generation command on the Edit menu. Open the dictionary with Open Dictionary on the File menu. Text files take some time to compile, so if you use this app frequently, try saving the compiled dictionary with the obvious command on the File menu.

If you find a generated word that you like, you can exclude that word from future generations by selecting all letters in that word and clicking the right mouse button on those letters. Right-clicking letters adds a lock symbol to those letters, meaning exactly what you think. Right-click again to remove the lock.

If the file name of a compiled dictionary is given as a command line argument, that dictionary will (hopefully) open at start-up (no blanks or quotes in the name of the dictionary). There are a number of public dictionaries available on the web. A Swedish dictionary is available here (get the most current archive), and several English ones are available here. The site www.speling.org has a number of dictionaries for other languages as well. The text dictionaries should be just a list of words, separated by newlines.

Unpack the zip and open the FZI-file in Astham (note that the databases are not compatible with versions prior to 1.1). This tool is freeware. No installation program, no registry keys, no INI-files. If you would like to get a copy of the source code, contact the author at the e-mail address at the bottom of this page. It's free too.

The program sucks at handling long input strings with a very large number of possible combinations, and will possibly crash if you try to generate something from, for example, "This is a very long input string with lots and lots of possible words in it". I'm working on a solution to this, but for now, limit your input to 10 - 15 characters maximum.

Astham will not output all possible anagrams given the input string and the current dictionary. When you retrieve the next anagram, Astham will output the next anagram where the first word in the "sentence" is different from the first word in the previous "sentence". This is not a bug. It's a way to allow the user to iterate through the possible words without pressing F4 a thousand times or more.

And, it is freeware. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that you do not have to pay anything for using the program, and you get access to all fantastic features at once. You do not have to register anything, you do not have to look at annoying ads. The bad news is that the program is most certainly full of bugs. Hopefully they are by now minor ones, but if you should come across something really awful, please let me know (using the address below).

1.0.001 January 16, 2005	Released.
1.1.001 January 31, 2005	Fixed a number of minor things, and a few major. Added some commands to the Edit menu. Changed database format, speeded up generation with several ugly hacks and a few not-so-ugly. Added a status bar and a way for the user to abort generation.
1.1.003 February 15, 2005	Much nicer letters, smaller exe.

Astham 1.1.003