I spent several months designing and publishing educational books containing crossword puzzles for PuzzleWise. Working with Dr. Daniel Levine using InDesign CS3 was a lot of fun, but we definitely had our road blocks. We used external software that read from a text file to generate the crossword puzzle graphic, but this was not enough for us because we needed more control over how the page was laid out in the book. After writing a couple of Bash scripts I was able to streamline the creation of the crossword puzzles by converting the text files to XML which InDesign CS3 could natively import-- in turn automatically importing the generated puzzle graphic, the words, and their descriptions could all be imported using this script. Making each of these ~200 page books much simpler. PuzzleWise and I were very pleased with the end result, and Dr. Levine has given me permission to use him as a reference on my resume. Screenshots: |
