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 sentance or phrase, with each cell containing a number. Then, a set of clues, whos 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

  • [ ] Add acrostic support to libipuz

    • [ ] Add new puzzle type to libipuz

    • [ ] Add documentation of any quirks or expectations

    • [ ] Add some loading / saving tests.

  • [ ] Add acrostic loading support to PuzzleSet

  • [ ] Create a simple play-acrostic widget

    • [ ] Create the main board

    • [ ] Write a PlayAnswer widget that can be used as an answer widget

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

    • [ ] Update XwordState to be able to handle Answer widgets

  • [ ] Add a test suite for XwordState

Prep work

  • [ ] Create a sample acrostic .ipuz

  • [ ] Separate PlayXword into a PlayWidget parent class and a subclass