Producing Electronic Crosswords From their Printed Versions

 

Most of us who indulge in crosswords, however infrequently, are well aware of the ‘crossings out syndrome’ as I call it, when trying to complete a puzzle from a printed newspaper or magazine.

Depending on the accuracy (or otherwise in my case!) of your initial guesses, it’s possible to end up with a board which is virtually illegible. And Tippex is no solution – it just takes too darned long to dry !

Having got thoroughly fed up with messy boards, and not found a better solution, I decided to look at the practicality of capturing an image of the printed version of a board and creating an electronic version from that. Much easier, with that available, to eliminate any mistaken clues without leaving a single mark on the printed version.

To cut a long story short, after much searching and several excursions into the AI world, I managed to come up with some HTML code which uses online optical recognition software to identify the black squares in a crossword matrix, from which it can then  work out the clue positions to match.

I’ve packaged this as an .html single file, which will run on most modern browsers. Although it was initially designed for Windows pcs, I’ve also tested it on various android tablets and confirmed it works for these devices also. The only restriction is that your device must be online – this is necessary to use the optical recognition software  and display the e-Board correctly.

You can download the .html file from my website.

To use the package, you’ll first need to take a good quality photo of your board, crop it to size and save the updated version. You can then run the HTML program from your browser and upload the image file into the program.

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program will then attempt to find the black squares within the captured image, and you then get the chance to check its accuracy, and correct the board where necessary, before starting to fill in your crossword.

Most phone-captured images do work pretty well, but some newspapers with thin paper and coloured images on the reverse side can be problematical. Always take your photo with the page flat to ensure the matrix is clearly defined and appears rectangular. If you get a poor result initially, adjust the slider upwards to capture more squares.

The program also allows you to save an empty or partially completed board – you can then reload it later, either on the same pc, or on another device with the .html file installed, and continue your crossword.

You can even store the black squares and clue positions to .csv files for import to the Excel Crossword Helper workbook (downloadable from this page) and then create your board there. You’ll find that the partial match, thesaurus and anagram options will help make light work of any clues you’re stuck on.

Happy imaging….and solving !

First published 1.11.26

 

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