It’s time for another Crosswords release.
I’ll keep this update short and sweet. I had grand plans last cycle to work on the word data and I did work a little on it — just not in the way I intended. Instead, a number of new contributors showed up which sent me in a different direction. I’m always happy to get new contributors and wanted to make sure they had a good experience. It ended up being a fun set of side quests before returning to the main set of features in the editor.
Cursor behavior
New contributor Adam filed a series of absolutely fantastic bug reports about the cursor behavior in the game. Adam fixed a couple bugs himself, and then pointed out that undo/redo behavior is uniquely weird with crosswords. Unlike text boxes, cursors have a natural direction associated with them that matters for the flow of editing.
In a nutshell, when you undo a word you want the cursor to be restored at the same orientation as where it was at the start of the guess. On the other hand, when redoing a guess, you want the cursor to advance normally, which might be in a different place or orientation. It’s subtle, but is the kind of user touch that you would normally never notice. It just feels “clunky” without a fix. With all these changes, the cursor behavior feels a lot more natural.
Can you spot the difference?
Selections and Intersections
Another side quest was to change the Autofill dialog to operate in-place. I foolishly thought that this would be a relatively quick change, but it ended up being a lot more work than expected. I’ll spare the details, but along the way, I also had to add three more features as dependencies.
First, I’ve wanted a way to leave pencil markings for a long time. These would transient markings that show possibilities for a square without marking. We use it to show the results of the in-place autofill operation.
Second I fixed an old bug that I’ve wanted to fix for a long time. Previously, the word list showed all possible words independently. Now it only shows words that show in both directions. As an example, in the grid below we don’t show “ACID — (80)” in the Down list as that final “D” would mean the Across clue would have “WD” as its prefix.
This required writing code to efficiently calculate the intersection of two lists. It sounds easy enough, but the key word here is “efficient”. While I’m sure the implementation could be improved, it’s fast enough for now for it to be used synchronously.
Finally, I was able to use the intersection function to optimize the autofill algorithm itself. It’s significantly faster also more correct than the previous implementation, which means that the resulting boards will be more usable. It still can’t do a full 15×15 grid in a reasonable time, but it can solve about 1/3 of a grid.
Other
- Federico and I are working with Pranjal as a GSOC student for the summer. He’s going to work on porting libipuz to rust, and we spent a good amount of time planning the approach for that as well as prepping the library.
- Tanmay has continued to work on the acrostic generator as part of last summer’s GSoC project. I’m so proud of his continued efforts in this space. Check out his recent post!
- Gwyneth showed up with support for UTF-8 embedding in puz files as well as support for loading .xd crossword files.
- I updated our use of libadwaita widgets to the latest release, and enabled style settings per-cell in the editor.
Until next time!