Adding Acrostic Support to Crosswords

Status: draft | unimplemented

Acrostic puzzles are two-pane puzzles. Typically, they consist of two sections. There’s a main grid that spells out a sentence or phrase, with each cell containing a number. Then, a set of clues, whose answers are made up from the letters of the grids. The first letter of each answer traditionally spells out the final answer to the clue.

For example, if the first section is a quote, then the first letter of the clues may spell out the author of the quote. There’s more about this type of puzzle on the wikipedia page.

Example Acrostic
Example Acrostic puzzle from wikipedia

Overall Plan

Prep work

  • [X] Decide between whether acrostics should inherit from IPuzCrossword. Answer: It should

  • [X] Create a couple sample acrostic .ipuz files

libipuz

  • [ ] Add acrostic support to libipuz

    • [X] Add new puzzle type to libipuz

      • [ ] Add documentation of any quirks or expectations

    • [X] Add some Acrostic test harness.

    • [X] Support loading acrostics

      • [X] Fix libipuz #22

      • [X] Add getter for answer clue

        • [X] Remove clue from clueset when appropriate

      • [ ] Add linters

      • [X] (Optional) Add fixup functions

Crosswords

  • [X] Extend PlayXword

    • [X] Write a PlayAnswer widget

      • [X] Update XwordState to be able to handle AnswerGrid widgets

    • [X] Write PlayAcrosticList that can be used as a clue list for acrostics

    • [X] Adjust style for focus changes

  • [X] Add a test suite for acrostics in XwordState