Installation

To install foster you need to install the Haskell Platform and then run:

cabal update
cabal install foster

Global flags

You can test that everything works properly by running:

foster --version

which will print the version.

You can also call --help from foster or any of the subcommands to open a manual page that will describe the syntax for every command.

You can always turn off output, by appending the -s/--silent flag. This may or may not improve performance.

Generating puzzles

In order to generate puzzles you need to write:

foster generate <rows>,<columns>

By default the puzzle is written to input.txt, but you can change that with the --output or -o flag. You can also specify the string to be used for the puzzle (by default is some string containing unicode characters and digits) with --text or -t.

For example, to generate a 3000x123 (3000 rows, 123 columns) puzzle stored in input2.txt using the text Some string you can use:

foster generate 3000,123 --output=input2.txt --text="Some string"

or equivalently:

foster generate 1000,1000 -oinput2.txt -t"Some String"

Solving puzzles

To solve puzzle you'll need to specify the input file (the file containing the pieces) and the output file (the file where to put the generated puzzle):

foster solve --input=input2.txt --output=output2.txt

The above will take the puzzle in input2.txt and solve it into output2.txt. By default foster will take the puzzle in input.txt and store it into output.txt.

Checking solutions

If you have a solution generated by some other program, you can check it against the one foster would generate by using:

foster check --input=input2.txt --output=output2.txt

Which will check that the solution in output2.txt is valid, given the input puzzle input2.txt. By default it will use input.txt and output.txt respectively.