Two old crosswords of mine
My lovely wife and I have just moved house, and while boxing up the contents of my desk I ran across physical paper copies of two weakly themed crosswords I made in 2011. Might as well immortalize them in the digital realm…
I created crosswords for Carnegie Mellon’s student newspaper,
The Tartan, circa 2003–2006.
In those years, I developed a suite of crossword-related software utilities
to help a crossword constructor (that is, me) with things like
laying out a symmetrical grid and even filling in the “fill” between
theme entries. (Filling in an irregular space with words from a dictionary
can be approached as an exact-cover problem, for which Donald Knuth’s
Dancing Links algorithm
is very well suited.) However, these two crosswords are dated
2011-11-10, and were definitely constructed without recourse to
xword-fill. They’re also hand-numbered “#2” and “#3” respectively;
I no longer have any recollection of what happened to “#1.”
I decided this would be a good time to pull out the old xword-typeset
utility and see if it still worked. After a little massaging of the
15-year-old code to deal with recent innovations such as “unused variable
warnings” and “UTF-8”… it works great! See the code on GitHub here.
git clone https://github.com/Quuxplusone/xword
cd xword
make xword-typeset
curl -O https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/code/2021-08-24-crossword2.txt
./xword-typeset 2021-08-24-crossword2.txt > 2021-08-24-crossword2.tex
pdflatex 2021-08-24-crossword2.tex
open 2021-08-24-crossword2.pdf
See the printer-ready crossword PDFs here:
Another way these puzzles are products of their time: CRT appears as a fill entry
in both. According to XwordInfo.com,
2011 was right on the exact cusp where the New York Times stopped
pairing CRT with clues like “Computer screen, for short” and started
giving it clues such as “Passé PC piece,” “Old oscilloscope part, briefly,”
and “Bygone monitor, for short.”
For those reading the code of xword-typeset and wondering what “HWEB” is:
It was my own prehistoric dialect of what today we’d call
Markdown. The syntax, like
the name, was just some mashup of bits of HTML and bits of
Knuth’s CWEB. Its only relevance to xword-typeset is that to
italicize part of a clue you use /slashes/
(whereas modern Markdown uses _underscores_).