Export & Publishing

Across Lite (.puz) Files

blacksquare can import and export .puz crossword files:

from blacksquare import Crossword

# Load from .puz
xw = Crossword.from_puz("puzzle.puz")

# Save to .puz
xw.to_puz("output.puz")

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New York Times Submission PDF

You can generate professional submission PDFs following official New York Times guidelines (requires the [pdf] optional dependency):

pip install "blacksquare[pdf]"

header_info = [
    "Author: Jane Doe",
    "Address: 123 Main St, New York, NY",
    "Email: jane@example.com",
]

xw.to_pdf("submission.pdf", header=header_info)

The resulting PDF contains: 1. A full puzzle grid with clue numbers, circled/shaded styling, and black blocks. 2. Formatted across and down clues. 3. Solution grid page.

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Jupyter Notebook HTML

In a Jupyter notebook or Google Colab environment, crosswords render automatically with HTML and CSS:

# In a Jupyter notebook cell:
xw