2007 Times Championship final puzzles – up at last

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Announcement
The Grand Final puzzles and solutions are now on the Times Online site. You can find them here.

Sadly, they’re picture files which print out no more than adequately (and that’s on a fairly new HP Laserjet which is pin sharp when the material is up to the job). The clues are readable for me, and the numbers in the grid just readable. Why they can’t produce decent PDFs in these cases I’ll never understand. (Oh, and close each of the individual windows showing the puzzles after doing the right-click/print thing – with two open, no printing took place from the second one.)

A special three-puzzle Unofficial RTC contest will be held for those who haven’t seen them before and promise that they haven’t looked at the solutions – this where Mark Goodliffe gets his chance to say “25 minutes for me”. I’ll put up a “your times please” post for it next Friday along with the usual weekly one.

10 comments on “2007 Times Championship final puzzles – up at last”

  1. They were awful in the printed paper too. I photocopied and enlarged them in the hope of reading clues better but the quality of the printing didn’t stand up well to this treatment.

    That’s part of my excuse for taking so long to solve them of course.

  3. This will make the most sense on a Windows XP PC, and will use up a fair bit of ink, but if you’re here, you’re probably used to printing pages with a lot of black. They came out clear and with a nice large grid for me…

    -Save the images (right click)
    -Open them using Windows Pictures and Fax viewer (it is under accessories in the start menu and is a default program with Windows)
    -Print them using the default settings (default is to print full page). On US letter, the grid turns out about two thirds the size of the Saturday jumbo grid, and the text for the clues close to 9-point font. It may look a little more stretched on A4.

    I use Windows Pictures and fax viewer for the sudokus and the supplement puzzles when they show up on the Times website, very useful little application.

    1. Well, I don’t seem to have that app. on my Win XP machines. I got some improvement by printing ‘scaled to page’ from another photo viewer, but the printed text and grid are still inferior to the HTML versions of Times puzzles on the Times xwd club, or a competently-produced PDF. The reason is very simple – both of those formats leave text as text, instead of converting it to a photo of text.

      Efforts like yours to help are very noble and praiseworthy, but should be unnecessary.

      1. Thanks Peter, it’s rare I achieve anything either notable or praiseworthy, but in my regular job I have to agonize over web accessibility.

        Interesting about the application – I wonder if that is a UK vs US thing? According to wikipedia it is not in Vista.

  4. I just right clicked on the picture then clicked on “print picture” and they came out large and clear!
    This is on Windows XP.
    Ann H
  5. They printed fine for me as long as I did not use ‘draft’ as I always do, but I wasn’t pleased that Puzzle One’s 29a fell off the page and disappeared completely!

    I deducted the minute I spent returning to the computer and reading the clue from my time!

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