New Year notes on problems with printing out

May I wish you all a new year of happy crosswording?

My recent blogs have been much concerned with the fallout from the switch to the new crossword site. It seems to be beginning to bed in, or it is if the falling volume of emails of complaint is anything to judge by. A few of you have even been kind enough to say that, with familiarity, it is an improvement on the previous version. However, for a significant minority, difficulties with printing are still an obvious source of anguish and rage.

The developers have been working to improve this side of things. The type size for the clues, which was already larger than that in the printed paper itself, has been increased and the previous ‘print preview’ stage has been reintroduced, so that you can now make personal size adjustments before actually printing out. There are now three routes to printing puzzles and you can choose the one that suits your needs best.

1. The print option. Having got the interactive version of your puzzle on the screen, click on the ‘Print’ option above the grid. This should open a new page, with a white grid and grey squares (to save you ink) and clues formatted to fit an A4 page. If you print this out (on my PC this involves poising the mouse arrow over the image and ‘right-clicking’ once, with other machines things will be different), you are offered a box to check before moving on to the printing itself. If you then click ‘+ more settings’, you can check on the default paper size. For most of you this should be A4, but you can try others. If you do so, the clues may run over to more than one page. At this stage you can also choose other destinations for the image than your usual default printer.

2. The PDF option. Click instead on ‘PDF version’. You should now have new page, with solid black grid squares and the solution to the previous puzzle at the bottom right. Start the printing process (as for 1 above) and the ‘preview’ box on the left will now allow you to choose a paper size to suit. You need to ensure that the ‘Fit to page’ box has a tick in it. If you choose smaller paper than A4, the print size will reduce (or, if the ‘Fit to page’ box is not ticked, the clues will stay the same but run over on to more than one page).

3. Print dialogue option (recommended only for those who know what they are doing). At the ‘print preview’ stage, click in the box on the left on ‘Print using system dialogue’. With this option you have some control over the layout of the grid and the clues by adjusting your printer and/or browser settings. The downside is that there are more things to go wrong; for example, the grid may not display properly, or the clues may run to more than one page, or the special instructions and setter’s name may not appear on cryptic puzzles.
One additional tip. If, with the basic interactive puzzle on your screen, you want to increase the type size of the clues for greater legibility (or decrease it so as to be able to see all the clues and the whole grid at the same time) this is easily achieved. With standard personal computers, hold down the Ctrl key and hit either the + or the – sign as many times as you want. With Macs the same effect, I think, can be achieved by holding down the Command key (the one to the left of the space bar) and hitting + or – in the same way.

Two final comments.

1. Despite all the above, there are now so many different types of computers, smart phones, browsers etc out there that individual problems will continue to arise. When they do and you are unable to resolve them, please send details to the User Help desk and they will investigate your difficulty. It will help them greatly, if you can give as much detail as possible about the browser(s) and operating system(s) you are using, preferably by going to http://www.thismachine.info/ and copying and pasting into you email what you get there as your full ‘user agent string’. It will look something like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36.

It would also help, if you were able to take, copy and send to the User Help desk at the same time a screen shot of what is going wrong. Instructions on how to take and save a screen shot may be found at http://www.take-a-screenshot.org/ .

2. There is no point in asking why the Guardian cannot go back to the old crossword site that you knew and loved, nor why it cannot just run the old and the new sites alongside each other as alternative options. I tried to explain the reason why this was so in my October blog, which can be read via the crossword home page or by copying and pasting this rather long URL into your browser: http://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2015/oct/09/life-after-beta-testing-new-guardian-crossword-website . For those with continuing transitional problems the User Help desk, the system developers and I are ready and willing to give all reasonable assistance to enable you to continue to enjoy your free online crosswords.
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In case you did not see the names of the 10 winners of Maskarade’s Christmas special prize puzzle No 26,759, they were: Rose Reeves, Bradford, West Yorkshire, Ron & Sue Falder, Lilleshall, Shropshire, Ann Radcliffe, Maine-et-Loire, France, A Besse, London W11, Hugh Betterton, Godalming, Surrey, Rupert Cousens, Oxford, Judith Goodman, London SW19, John Di Mambro, Wishaw, North Lanarkshire, F Jackson, Harlow, Essex and Kathryn Greenhalgh, Stafford, Staffs.
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The December Genius (No 150 by Boatman) got off to a bad start, with much of the first Monday, 7 December, been taken up with getting a usable version of the puzzle on to the screen. As a result there was only one correct entry by the end of that day, received at 22:23 from GM in Sussex. (JS with gmail would have beaten him by 3 minutes, but for one slight error.) There were also fewer than usual entries in total by the deadline – 149 – about half the size of recent fields. Congratulations to Jeffrey Goldsmith from Bromham in Bedfordshire, who is the winner of the December Genius competition.

If you have any technical problems with our crossword service, please email userhelp@theguardian.com. If you have any comments or queries about the crosswords, please email crossword.editor@theguardian.com. For Observer crosswords please email crossword.editor@observer.co.uk.