Doctor’s Note: This Week/Book Update
Congratulations to our contributing puzzlemaster Palmer Mebane for his dominant performance throughout the general competition at the recent World Puzzle Championship. Over the coming weeks we will post several of the puzzles Palmer wrote before the WPC as practice here, which should show you the dedication a puzzle champion must have to his craft.
As we get back into a regular schedule, you can find the set of puzzles we posted over the last two weeks gathered in this PDF. Here are the puzzles you can expect from Monday to Saturday this week (highlight to view):
Monday – Yajilin by Grant Fikes
Tuesday – Fillomino by Grant Fikes
Wednesday – Sudoku Variation by Thomas Snyder
Thursday – Star Battle by Thomas Snyder
Friday – Cross the Streams by Grant Fikes
Saturday – Smashed Sums Variation by Palmer Mebane
Now that the WPC is over, our focus is back on finishing our large book project “The Art of Puzzles”. This has taken awhile to put together as it has grown to be an over 250 puzzle title, with at least 25 puzzles in 10 different styles (Tapa, Nurikabe, Masyu, Slitherlink, TomTom, Skyscrapers, Fillomino, Cave, Star Battle, and Battleships). We have almost two dozen authors represented from around the world, including all of our contributing puzzlemasters to varying degrees. Grant Fikes deserves particular credit for the high quantity and quality of the puzzles he has provided (about 20%, basically tied with Dr. Sudoku) including many very large grids. One special treat is that the Tapa section was written entirely by Serkan Yürekli, the originator of the style and a true Tapa Master. You’ll definitely appreciate some of the surprises he packed into his puzzles. Some of the last tasks to do on the book now are to gather and write a really good set of hint/tutorial sections for the puzzles which may go into the book or may just end up online as an extra supplement. We are also looking through different printing and binding options and expect to offer both print and electronic forms of the book on release. Look for more announcements on “The Art of Puzzles” here soon.
Looking at different binding options? I do hope you’ll consider some kind of coil binding like David Millar used in his book; the ability for a book to lay flat with only one page facing up can be a good idea.
That’s one of the main considerations, but that also means I need to do a larger printing run to make the costs affordable. It’s a plan that works well with a list of subscribers known in advance (such as through a Kickstarter campaign) as then fulfillment can be arranged with the printer. Otherwise, I become a shipping center and costs can get out of hand. I think this was part of David’s problem with his first title.
I second the spiral binding request, and would be happy to support a Kickstarter campaign.
Another idea: offer a package deal to order a print book plus pdf, not just either/or. This will allow me to print a second copy of a puzzle if – OK, when – I mess up the one in the book by making a mistake while solving in ink. 🙂
Congratulations to you as well on your performance on the WPC, as well as both of your puzzle contributions in Round 6. I am looking forward to the book.
To hijack the thread a bit, what kind of programs do you guys use to draw the puzzles? I am thinking on making some myself but I don’t really know how to start.
P.S. Who created which puzzle on the WPC?
Did the round solutions not include the author information? (I ask because I only got my round booklet but not the solutions) The concept was an abandoned LMI test idea of mine so many of the puzzle concepts already existed but we split up the writing. I handled TomTom, Battleships, Spiral Galaxies, and Kuromasu. Palmer did the Shikaku, Nurikabe, and Rolling Maze puzzles. Wei-Hwa did the Yajilin, Criss-Cross, and Tents.
I have come a long way in how I make puzzle art, using programs like Illustrator for awhile. [I was never ever willing to use Excel and then do a screen capture, but this seems the most common method of very early bloggers.] Now, I actually have my own postscript generating code for most of the puzzle styles here which takes a puzzle definition file and creates usable ps or eps files. These directly become the pdfs I post and also get resaved as png in Illustrator for posting but other programs like ImageMagick can be used too if you don’t care about file size. So, these 10×10 36 pixel square grids are done that way. I believe Palmer built his own drafting tool as well which he described briefly on LMI. He once had plans to make it more public but I don’t know where that went. That thread has some other ideas too.
You are right, it did. Silly me for not checking the solution sheet first before posting.
I guess I can write my own code. It shouldn’t be too hard, though it may be annoying. The main advantage of that is that I can write a solution checker as well. What font do you use, by the way?
It really depends on how many puzzles you intend to write and post or print. I only went to code before I self-published “The Art of Sudoku” and integrated some puzzle checking steps with my art generation steps to be sure those 120 puzzles would all be valid and consistently formatted. Most of the old Friday Puzzles were hand-done with art drafting software since there weren’t as many to make and they were of quite varied styles.
I usually use some flavor of Helvetica.
On producing puzzle eps files: I’d used Asymptote, a vector graphics language, for mathematical drawing, and it proved quite helpful for puzzles as well.
On eps to png conversion: of the free alternatives to Adobe that I’ve tried (ImageMagick, Inkscape, Ghostscript, and a number of free online converters), Ghostscript has been the best in terms of options available, image quality, and file size.
Coil binding is a good idea – it makes it so much easier to solve the puzzles when you’re on the road as well.
Compare the Nikoli magazines where if it hadn’t been for the cute drawings I’d just cut the binding and kept the number puzzle pages only.
I already own Crossword Compiler, which is most normally used for constructing Crosswords (but has a few Sudoku-specific features. It is has enough features that I can typeset most grid-based logic puzzles in that I want to, provided that I make a few adjustments here and there.
Postscript programming is clearly a better approach for several reasons, but I had no reason to re-invent the wheel, so I didn’t.
I ended up hacking out a Java program similar the one Palmer used. The only drawbacks are that it does not do vector graphics, and that it does not handle many puzzle types (yet).
I also support the book + pdf package, as long as it isn’t too troublesome for you to do so.