The KHangMan HandbookCopyright © 2001, 2009 Anne-Marie Mahfouf
KHangMan is the classic hangman game for children, adapted for KDE.
Table of Contents
IntroductionKHangMan is a game based on the well-known hangman game. It is aimed at children aged six and over. The game has several categories of words to play with and among them: (animals words) and three difficulty categories: , and . A word is picked at random, the letters are hidden, and you must guess the word by trying one letter after another. Each time you guess a wrong letter, part of a picture of a hangman is drawn. You must guess the word before being hanged! You have 10 tries.
Using KHangMan
Here you can see KHangMan as it is the first time you run it. Category is Animals, language is default (English here, the default is your current KDE language if the data exists), the theme is "Sea". Any changes in category, language or theme (background) are written in the configuration file and restored in your next game.
Please note how easy it is to change the theme, just click on the combo box on the toolbar. Getting a new word and quitting the game are also easily done by clicking on the corresponding buttons on the toolbar.
A word is chosen and its letters are displayed as an underscore (_) symbol. You know how many letters there are in the word. You have to guess the word by trying one letter after another. You enter the letter in the text box and you either press the Enter key or click on the button to see if the letter belongs or not to the word.
The word is picked at random and it is not the same as the previous word.
Important
All the words are nouns (there are no verbs or adjectives, etc.).
If you need help guessing the word, you can click on the Show
Hint icon 
in the
toolbar and a hint will be displayed to give you some clue about the word.
Clicking the Show Hint icon again will hide the hint.
Hints are not displayed in default start mode.
Usually, it is not important whether you type in lowercase or uppercase. The program converts all input into lowercase (except for German words beginning with an uppercase letter). The program does that automatically.
The current category and current language are displayed in the statusbar.
Each time you guess a letter that is not in the word, another part of the hangman is drawn. You have 10 tries to guess the word. After that, the correct answer is displayed.
There are 4 categories: easy, medium, hard and animals, plus categories for other topics in some languages. The program scans for all data files in all languages and uses Kanagram words files as well.
In the easy category, the words are quite simple and related to everyday life. It is suitable for children from 6 to 9. The animals category contains only names of animals so they are easier to find. Some of them are easy, others are more difficult. In the medium category, the words are longer and more difficult. It is suitable for ages 9+. The hard category is just that, hard, i.e. the words are difficult to spell and not very well known. This category is challenging, even for adults.
After a word is guessed (or the hangman is completed), you are congratulated and prompted for another word. You can either click on Play again and another word is ready to be guessed or select another to play. To quit the game now select -> or click the Quit icon in the toolbar.
You type the letter you want to try in the text box (the mouse cursor is ready in the text box) and you hit the Enter key or click the button. If the letter belongs to the word, it takes its place, as many times as it appears in the word. If the letter does not belong to the word, it goes in the Misses field and a further part of the hangman is drawn on the right. You have ten tries and after that you lose and the correct word is displayed.
During the game, you can choose to start a new game by going in the
menu and choosing or
clicking on the New icon 
on
the toolbar. You can also change
the category of words using the menu (this
will bring you a new word for the new category).
The look can easily be changed with the toolbar holding the look dropdown box.
The Quit button on the toolbar
allows you to easily quit the
game.
You can also play the game with a local file installed on your machine that you will open using the menu and choosing .
Playing in different languagesYou can play KHangMan in many languages including: Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US and GB), Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Serbian (Latin and Cyrillic), Slovenian, Tajik, Swedish, Russian and Turkish. You can even try Chinese if you install the files from Kanagram!!
By default, after the first installation of KHangMan, only English and your KDE language if it is one of the above and if you have the corresponding kde-i18n package will be installed. For example if you are a Danish user and if you have KDE in Danish, in you will see two items: English and Danish and Danish will be the default.
You can still play KHangMan in other languages. It is very easy to add new data in KHangMan. All you need is a working Internet connection. You click on the menu and then on . A dialog appears, similar to this one:
Click on the language name you want to install and then on the button. If the language is successfully installed, a green tick is displayed in front of the language name and the turns to . The data is immediately installed and available in KHangMan. You click on the button to close the Get New Words dialog (if you want another data file, you can repeat these steps).
You can then easily change the language by going in the and choose the new language.
Please note that you can now type the special characters in a language by displaying the Special Characters toolbar. This toolbar holds buttons with an icon of each special character per language like é in French for example. Clicking on such a button will write the corresponding letter in the input line and you validate your choice with Enter. You can of course also use the keyboard layout corresponding to the language. This toolbar can be shown or hidden. The setting is restored next time you play KHangMan.
Important
Please note that you need Arial and URW Bookman fonts in order to display the special characters correctly in some languages. Provided you have those fonts installed, KHangMan will automatically use them. If you see small squares instead of letters, then you may not have one of these fonts installed. Type fonts:/ into the Konqueror address bar to check which fonts you have installed.
A few tipsIn English, try to guess the vowels first. Then have a go with the most common consonants: l, t, r, n, s
When you see “io”, try n after that, in French and English.
In Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese, the accented vowels can be discovered when you type the non accented corresponding vowel. For example, all the accented “a” are displayed in the word when you type “a”. This is when Type accented letters on the Languages page of KHangMan's configuration dialog is not checked. When Type accented letters is checked, then you have to type the accented letters yourself. When you type “a”, only “a” is displayed and you have to type for example ã for this letter to be displayed.
Did you know? In English, the most common letter is e (12.7%), followed by t (9.1%) then a (8.2%), i (7.0%) and n (6.7%).
Menubar and toolbarsThe menu has 3 items: , and .
brings you a new game, i.e. a new word to guess, in the same category you already are. will display the Get New Stuff dialog to allow you to download data in a new language. quits the game by closing the main window and writing the actual settings in the configuration file.
The menu allows you to choose the category of words you want to play with and also three difficulty categories.
The menu allows you to change the language the words are displayed in.
The menu proposes two themes: the and the . The background and the font colors change for each theme.
The menu allows you to configure KHangMan easily. First, , and give you the possibility to hide or show the toolbars, hints and the statusbar.
There are four toolbars: the , and toolbars which are the one on top with the buttons and combo boxes and the Special Characters toolbar which, when it is shown, is on the bottom. This toolbar has buttons with the special characters for each language: accented letters and other special characters. This allows users to easily play in another language without having to configure a new keyboard layout. You click on a special letter and it is displayed as the letter to try. Pressing Enter will make the program see if the letter is present in the word or not. The toolbar can be hidden if you don't want it. This is saved in the configuration file so if the toolbar is hidden, it will be hidden next time you run KHangMan.
Tip
It is of course possible to move the toolbars around. Put the mouse cursor on the small handle on the left of the toolbar, press the mouse button and drag the toolbar to position it on the screen where you want it. If you point the mouse on one of the toolbars and press the right mouse button, a context menu appears to let you choose different options for the toolbar.
is a standard KDE setting dialog that allows you to choose different shortcut keys for different actions. For example, Ctrl+Q is the standard shortcut for .
is also a standard KDE menu item that allows you to add or suppress items from the toolbar.
Here you have KHangMan with the Desert theme, French language and category Easy. The Special Characters toolbar is shown here.
The category is chosen with a combo box in the toolbar or via the menu in the menubar. Available are , , and and some more. is related to common objects a child aged six or seven knows. regards nouns a bit more challenging, is quite difficult and is only animals nouns. There are also some other categories of words, depending on the language.
All words are nouns. No verbs, no adjectives. The chosen category is then displayed on the statusbar.
Only letters are allowed to be typed in the text box.
Available SettingsA toolbar is provided for quick access to some settings. You can click on a button to have a new game (i.e. a new word), to see the hint or to quit the game. The theme is easily changed via a combo box on the toolbar.
In -> you will find tree pages. The first one is for General settings.
Require more guesses for duplicate letters: this is unchecked as default. When unchecked, if you try the letter "a" and the word has several as, they will be all displayed. For example if the word is "potato" and you try "o", both os will be diaplayed. If you check this option however, only the first "o" will be displayed and you will have to try it one more time to display the second "o" in "potato". This increases the difficulty.
Enable animations: the default is checked, that means that when you win a game, a message box will be displayed to tell you that you won and ask you if you want to play again. If you uncheck this option, this dialog is not displayed anymore, instead a new game starts directly after 3 seconds.
Enable hints globally: the default is unchecked. Hints are not shown. If you check this (or use the Show Hints icon or the -> menu or use the shortcut Ctrl+H), a hint will be displayed above the word to guess to help you find the word more easily.
In the Sounds section, if you check Enable sounds then a sound will be played on new game and another sound will be played when you win a game.
The Languages Settings tab allows you to set some settings specific to some languages. If the settings are not available for the language you are playing in then those settings will be grayed and disabled so you cannot choose them.
Type accented letters is available for Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan in KHangMan's configuration dialog. If you check Type accented letters then you will have to type all accented vowels (like ã). If this remains unchecked, when you type any vowel, all accented vowels will be displayed as well.
The Timers Settings tab allows you to set Time for displaying the Already Guessed Letter tooltip.
Time for displaying the Already Guessed Letter tooltip allows you to increase or decrease the time for displaying the Already Guessed Letter tooltip. This tooltip is a label which appears when you tried a letter that was already tried. Some people will want not to see it for long while children will need time to understand it and thus will need to set the display for a longer duration.
Command Reference- -> (Ctrl+N)
New game (i.e. new word)
- -> (Ctrl+O)
Open a local file to play with the words
- -> (Ctrl+G)
Display the Get Hot New Stuff! dialog which lists all the data available in the different languages.
- -> (Ctrl+Q)
Quits KHangMan
- ->
Choose the list of animals words to guess
All other installed categories are displayed as items in this menu as well.
- ->
Choose the list of easy words to guess
- ->
Choose the list of medium difficulty words to guess
- ->
Choose the list of difficult words to guess
- ->
Choose the English language for the words to guess.
All other installed languages are displayed as items in this menu as well.
- ->
Choose the Sea background picture and associated font colors
- ->
Choose the Desert background picture and associated font colors
- ->
Toggle the , , and toolbars.
- -> (Ctrl+H)
Toggle the display of hints.
- ->
Toggle the statusbar.
- ->
Open standard KDE setting dialog that allows you to choose different shortcut keys for different actions.
- ->
Configure the items you want to put in the toolbar.
- ->
Display the KHangMan settings dialog.
- -> (F1)
Invokes the KDE Help system starting at the KHangMan help pages. (this document).
- -> (Shift+F1)
Changes the mouse cursor to a combination arrow and question mark. Clicking on items within KHangMan will open a help window (if one exists for the particular item) explaining the item's function.
- ->
Opens the Bug report dialog where you can report a bug or request a “wishlist” feature.
- ->
Opens a dialog where you can edit the Primary language and Fallback language for this application.
- ->
This will display version and author information.
- ->
This displays the KDE version and other basic information.
Developer's Guide to KHangManPlease follow the procedure and then send me the files tarred and gzipped
to (annma AT kde.org).
Please have a look in KHangMan in the menu to see if your language is available yet. If it is, then you can check if it contains hints.
The standard list words are stored in 4 separate files, so to make different categories. The files are in
/khangman/data/. The file
easy.kvtml is for category easy, the file
medium.kvtml is for category medium, the file
animals.kvtml is for category animals and the file
hard.kvtml is for category hard.
English is the default and thus the only language to be shipped with KHangMan. All other languages data are put in the corresponding kde-l10n module.
The files use the kvtml format. The tag
<text>is for the word and the tag<comment>is for the hint, those are within a<entry>tag. Please try to match the hint with the category of difficulty. The category will require an easy hint but the category will require the definition in the dictionary. Try not to use words of the same family in the hint, that would give the word away too easily!Note that you must use UTF-8 encoding when editing the files. If your editor cannot do this, try using KWrite or Kate. When opening a file in KWrite or Kate you can select utf8 encoding with the combo box at the top of the file open dialog.
An example of a kvtml file is as follow:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <DOCTYPE kvtml PUBLIC "kvtml2.dtd" "http://edu.kde.org/kanagram/kvtml2.dtd"> <kvtml version="2.0"> <information> <generator>converter</generator> <title>Animals</title><!--Translate tag content--> <comment>Animals from across the planet</comment><!--Translate tag content--> </information> <identifiers> <identifier id="0" > <locale>en</locale> </identifier> </identifiers> ... <entry id="0" > <inactive>false</inactive> <inquery>false</inquery> <translation id="0" > <text>bear</text><!--Translate all text tags content--> <comment>Large heavy animal with thick fur</comment><!--Translate all comment tags content--> </translation> </entry> ... </kvtml>At the beginning of the file, you should translate the content of the
<title>and the<comment>tags which are within the<information>tag. The title will be the one that will appear in the Category menu of the game (where the user chooses the file to play with).Then within the
<identifier>tag, please put your language code instead of en in<locale>.Please don't translate the file name itself as filenames should never contain any special characters. Thus please save your file with the same English filename.
Edit the kvtml files with a text editor (it will be easier if you use the XML syntax highlighting) and replace each word inside the
<text>tag with a translated word and each hint inside a<comment>with a translated hint. It is not really important that the exact meaning is preserved, but try to keep the length and category of difficulty roughly the same.You can include words with white space or - in them, in that case the white space or the - will be shown instead of the _. Please contact me if there is anything special related to your language so I can adapt the code to it (especially the special and accented characters).
You can just translate the words but you can also adapt them following the category and add new words if you want. For example, “table” is in category easy in English but in your language, it can be category medium. Feel free to adapt the files to your language needs. The number of words in a file is not important, you can add some if you want.
Remember that all words are nouns.
You can then commit your files in l10n-kde4/<lang_code>/data/kdeedu/khangman. Don't forget to update the CMakeLists.txt file as well. Please contact me by email if you need further information. When you send me the files, please don't forget to mention any special characters used in your language (put them in a text file, one per line and add this file in the tarball) and please mention any other specificity.
Please never commit files in a BRANCH as it might break the game.
Many thanks for your contribution!
What is stored by KHangMan and where
When you get a new language via ->, the new
language data is stored in $KDEHOME/share/apps/kvtml/ in the language code
folder. The available language dir names are also stored in the KHangMan
config file in $KDEHOME/share/config/khangmanrc.
The provider name (i.e. the address of the website where to download the new languages) is stored in $KDEDIR/share/apps/khangman/khangmanrc.
The English language (default) and the user language from his i18n package(s)
(if available) are stored in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kvtml.
In the configuration file, stored for each user in $KDEHOME/share/config/khangmanrc are saved all the game settings such as the background, last category played, ... plus the files that were downloaded from the Get Hot New Stuff! dialog.
Questions and AnswersThis document may have been updated since your installation. You can find the latest version at http://docs.kde.org/.
- 6.1. I have an error message telling me the pictures cannot be found.
- 6.2. KHangMan does not start correctly after I upgraded from an earlier version to the KDE 4 version
Credits and LicenseKHangMan
Program copyright 2001-2007 Anne-Marie Mahfouf (annma AT kde.org)
Contributors:
Hangman graphics: Renaud Blanchard
(kisukuma AT chez.com)Sounds: Ludovic Grossard
(ludovic.grossard AT libertysurf.fr)Blue theme, icons and code: Primoz Anzur
(zerokode AT gmx.net)Swedish data files, coding help, transparent pictures and i18n fixes: Stefan Asserhäll
(stefan.asserhall AT telia.com )Nature theme: Joe Bolin
(jbolin AT users.sourceforge.net)Softer Hangman Pictures: Matt Howe
(mdhowe AT bigfoot.com)Spanish data files: eXParTaKus
(expartakus AT expartakus.com )Spanish data hints: Rafael Beccar
(rafael.beccar AT kdemail.net )Danish data files: Erik Kjaer Pedersen
(erik AT mpim-bonn.mpg.de )Finnish data files: Niko Lewman
(niko.lewman AT edu.hel.fi )Brazilian Portuguese data files: João Sebastião de Oliveira Bueno
(gwidion AT mpc.com.br )Catalan data files: Antoni Bella
(bella5 AT teleline.es )Italian data files: Giovanni Venturi
(jumpyj AT tiscali.it )Dutch data files: Rinse
(rinse AT kde.nl )Portuguese data files: Pedro Morais
(morais AT kde.org )Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin) data files: Chusslove Illich
(chaslav AT sezampro.yu )Slovenian data files: Jure Repinc
(jlp AT holodeck1.com )Czech data files: Lukáš Tinkl
(lukas AT kde.org )Tajik data files: Roger Kovacs
(rkovacs AT khujand.org )Norwegian (Bokmål) data files: Torger Åge Sinnes
(torg-a-s AT online.no )Hungarian data files: Tamas Szanto
(tszanto AT mol.hu )Norwegian (Nynorsk) data files: Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes
(gaute AT verdsveven.com )Turkish data files: Mehmet Özel
(mehmet_ozel2003 AT hotmail.com )Bulgarian data files: Radostin Radnev
(radnev AT yahoo.com )Irish (Gaelic) data files: Kevin Patrick Scannell
(scannell AT slu.edu )Coding help: Robert Gogolok
(mail AT robert-gogolok.de)Coding help: Benjamin Meyer
(ben AT meyerhome.net)Code fixes: Lubos Lunàk
(l.lunak AT kde.org)Code fixes: Albert Astals Cid
(tsdgeos AT terra.es)Usability study: Celeste Paul
(seele AT obso1337.org)
Documentation copyright 2001-2007 Anne-Marie Mahfouf (annma AT kde.org)
This documentation is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
This program is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
InstallationTable of Contents
KHangMan is part of the KDE project http://www.kde.org/.
KHangMan can be found in the kdeedu package on ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/, the main FTP site of the KDE project.
Compilation and installationFor detailed information on how to compile and install KDE applications see Building KDE4 From Source
Since KDE uses cmake you should have no trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems please report them to the KDE mailing lists.