My Hanjie Process XXXVI

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.


We are almost ready to share our puzzle. We still need to do some final formatting. I will once again be using a spreadsheet. You can find a copy at: https://1drv.ms/x/s!Ar3VXpGA-24u7jIZhmM1gPaI291q

We are actually going to go back a bit. We are going to use an old worksheet. This would be the last sheet before we began testing. We had a fully prepared grid. The numbers were ready, but we had nothing marked as shaded and unshaded. This will work for finalizing the shared version.

The final formatting would be up to anyone who develops these puzzles. I'm going to show how I have been doing it. I have been using the row immediately below the puzzle to provide additional information. On the left side of the puzzle, which is usually column B since I like keeping space on the side, I identify the puzzle number. I will do things a little differently for this one and call it Hanjie Example.

On the right side of the puzzle within the same row, I like to provide a URL. Instead of aiming at a puzzle-specific URL, I typically use a broader target such as a blog. In this particular case, I have decided to point to this series of blog posts via a tag. Specifically, I will use: http://maritimeorca.blogspot.com/search/label/Hanjie

The URL needs to be right aligned to keep the right side of the URL aligned with the right side of the puzzle. I also have to update the font in this row. I have gone with a 12 point font size and changed the font to bold. I also used AutoFit for the row height.

The next steps involve the page layout. Since this puzzle is wider than it is high, I have decided to use the landscape orientation. Then I selected the puzzle and the text that I just added. I set the print area to this selection. For margins, I told Excel to center the spreadsheet on the page both horizontally and vertically.

Here is roughly how the puzzle now looks:

If we wanted, we could share the puzzle as an Excel file, but I have other plans that I will share in the future.

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