I’ve polished up the mess that is puzzle-draw a bit. With the latest release, you should be able to download working binaries for Linux and Mac. More importantly, I put together an ugly but fully functional web frontend that you can use:

arp.vllmrt.net/puzzles/draw/

Depending on how well the server holds up, you can use it to edit puzzles interactively, and download the graphics in different formats.

It’s still a huge mess of various undocumented puzzle formats, but the examples should give you an idea of what’s possible. Let me know if you have problems, here or on github. In particular, I’m generally always happy to add common puzzle types, as long as someone has a need for them.

I’ve released an updated version of my puzzle-drawing tool, install from hackage or get the source. It’s a rather incremental update.

Changes include:

• a nicer font
• the README now has brief installation and usage instructions
• there’s no longer a separate package for the command line tool
• some new puzzle types and rendering improvements

I’ve also updated the demo webapp, it now has examples for almost all supported puzzle types.

A while ago I alluded to some puzzle rendering project I was working on, today I want to give a small update. It’s a Haskell library called puzzle-draw, the source code is available on github. It’s  in a state where it’s useful to me (I used it for the entire marathon set, for instance), not necessarily quite ready for public consumption.

If you just want to play around with it, I’ve hacked together a web demo, below I’ll give an overview and explain how to install the command line tool.

EDIT: The command line tool has since changed to not require cairo by default, see the comments.
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There seems to be a lack of information out there when it comes to rendering puzzles. The most obvious approach is probably to use a vector graphics program such as Inkscape, but people also use spreadsheet software or write Postscript directly. I’ve recently started using the Haskell Diagrams framework (more on that in a future post), but for today, I want to share how to render pretty puzzles using TikZ via LaTeX.
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