My Hanjie Process XII

If you have visited my Mental Exercise blog, you are probably aware of the fact that I have been making hanjie/nongram/griddler/crosspic/piccross/edel/Japanese puzzles for years. I have decided to show my process from start to finish on how I actually put these together including development of the image, preparing the numbers, testing, and conversion to PDF.


Now that we have shaded the areas for the easy overlaps, it's time to mark our first unshaded cells in the puzzle.

We are going to look at the 17th column, and I'm going to show you two ways to look at it. That's the first column with a 10 above it. I have decided to show every possibility of where the 10 can go. These possibilities have also been included in worksheet 18 in the spreadsheet that I will be using today. That same sheet will be used for the bulk of these examples. That spreadsheet can be found at: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=2E6EFB80915ED5BD!9193&authkey=!AHtEHRdZ8UaAIN0&ithint=file%2cxlsx

A hard-to-see red outline reflects each location the 10 can go. The black shaded cells are the cells that we had previously determined have to be shaded. Red shaded cells are part of each possible 10 that was not previously shaded. Red X's show cells that would have to be unshaded for each possible 10.

The first three examples are obviously not possible since they would all require at least one cell to be unshaded that we have already established must be shaded. The remaining eight examples, however, can't be ruled out at this time. Those eight possibilities all have something in common.

As you can see, none of the possible locations for the 10 allow for any of the top three cells to be shaded. I can simply this process for you in a similar manner to the overlaps we previously sought. Start by looking for the topmost possible location. You should be able to easily tell the first three are impossible for the reasons mentioned above. A 10 starting at the fourth cell from the top is as high as you can possibly go. Then look for the bottommost location, which will turn out to be the bottom ten cells.

You should be able to tell from this example that the top three cells must be unshaded. This is usually marked by either X's or dots. Since I am using Excel, I will turn the gray cell white.

Of course, I mentioned two approaches to handling this column. The other is easier. Since the column shows a single value, we know that all the shaded cells belong to it. Start from the bottom of the three shaded cell and count ten cells above them. This will show the furthest up the 10 can extend, and we will once again find that the top three must be unshaded.

Now that we have finished, I will copy the puzzle to worksheet 19 in my spreadsheet and update it with the unshaded cells.

It's should be clear what I will do next, finding more unshaded cells using the same approach, but I'm going to leave that for my next update.

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