Printing NY Times Crossword Puzzles Using Across Lite & AutoIt Script

Posted 05 May 2024

I and my wife are crossword puzzle addicts. To feed our habits, I signed up for the NY Times crossword puzzle archives and downloaded the Friday, Saturday and Sunday puzzles (the Mon-Thurs puzzles were too easy) for each week between January 2015 and December 2022.

Originally I would print out a puzzle as required by opening/printing the puzzle file using Across Lite, but this got old in a hurry. So, I decided I would create a program to automagically print an entire folder’s worth of puzzles in ‘batch mode’ utilizing two-sided printing – yay! Looking around for the best/easiest way to accomplish this, I ran across an application called ‘AutoIt’, specifically created as a shell-script generator to run Windows (or Mac) applications and system functions.

It took a while to work my way through the command reference and examples, but eventually I was able to create an AutoIt shell script to do what I wanted; The script prompts the user for a directory containing Across Lite *.puz files, and offers to print them all in equal N-puzzle batches, thereby allowing the user to print a batch and then move the printed puzzles from the output tray to the input tray for a double-sided result.

This worked great, with the only downside being that the user’s PC cannot be used for anything else while the script is running, as it grabs the mouse cursor to launch Across Lite and print the current .puz file.

Here’s the script, as it stands now in May of 2024 (saved on my system as C:\Users\Frank\Documents\Personal\Crosswords\Print Pending\240504 PUZ Print Script.au3):

And here is the output log for printing the contents of the ‘C:\Users\Frank\Documents\Personal\Crosswords\Print Pending\2015’ folder containing 156 puzzle files, printed in four batches of 39 files each:

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