28 comments on “Guardian/Observer forthcoming changes”

  1. KenMac why is the Azed blog a problem ? ( using words I can follow please ) .

    If it is not possible can you just put up a page like this on a Sunday ? It is only a few people and we can discuss and answer any questions between us .

  2. It was always as PDF format, from which clues, lengths, grid could be extracted reasonably easily. This week’s was in JPEG format, that’s simply a picture which is not much help.

  3. There’s more on this week’s Guardian Crossword Blog – here

    “Where have you put my beloved Azed?
    Azeds up to 2,757 will remain in place on this website, accessible from the Azed index. From 2,758 (27 April), Azeds will appear at observer.co.uk. There will be a new postal address for entries, while the PO box for the clue-writing competition will be just the same.

    Right … but what about Everyman? And the Speedy, come to that?
    The entry-level Everyman puzzle and the noncryptic Speedy will likewise be found at observer.co.uk from numbers 4,097 and 1,542 respectively. Older ones will stay where they are in their archives.”

    The Quiptic and a new Quick Crossword will continue to appear in the Guardian on Sundays.

  4. Roz, there may be more than just a few of us. To date, my Azed blog published yesterday morning has attracted 445 views, suggesting that there may be quite a lot of lurkers who never post but who do nevertheless read the blogs. The utility that many of us bloggers use makes writing and uploading a blog a fairly painless process, but if you have to type out the clues and construct a grid from scratch, it becomes a chore. Let’s hope the new owners are prepared to accommodate our needs. It’s very encouraging that they were prepared to post both here and on the Crossword Centre website.

  6. I’ve had a go at converting the file and sent it on to see if it works. But I haven’t checked the results word for word.

  7. Bridgesong@4 I see what you mean and perhaps they will sort it out once things settle down . I will give the Observer the benefit of the doubt to start with but I am not optimistic , I suspect I will stop buying the paper and have to stop doing Azed .

  8. OK, so looking to see if I could use the utility, that conversion hasn’t managed to read the words to convert into text from an image into pdf, I’m obviously copying and pasting images. That’s more typing than I do for the Quick Cryptic.

  10. Rudolf @9 – no, sorry – same problems as before – looks like a worse quality version of the same thing that I produced – a pdf to make printing easier, rather than extracting the information. Playing around to see if I can work OCR (optical character reader) on that version I’m finding it isn’t very clear.

  12. Windows has a built-in Print to PDF driver, which works a treat in my experience.
    Alternatively, open a new document in Word or (free) Libreoffice, or whatever, in landscape mode. Insert the PDF as a picture. The version of Word I use has a Save to Adobe PDF ready included.
    If you use GIMP (free) as your default viewer for jpg files you can export direct to pdf.
    When it was a pdf on the site I used to open it in GIMP, trimmed the image to just this week’s puzzle, exported to jpg, then inserted the jpg in a word page, resized to get the largest font appearance I could, and printed that.

  13. Goujeers@12 – you are talking about printing out grids to solve the puzzle.

    To produce a blog we have to extract the grid and all the words of the clues to enter into the blog. Now there are several ways of doing this:
    1. Using some software, the utility, to extract that information from a pdf. For that to work, that pdf cannot be made from a picture, but from a document using words, whether converted by GIMP or whatever. That utility then produces the layout many of us use (I use it to blog the Quiptics or if I cover the Guardian).
    2. Quite a few of us use our own blog layouts and copy and paste the clues from the website into that layout to blog (it’s how I do the Quick Cryptic, although that’s complicated by some of the coding to hide stuff, so that one is all typed in code), which takes significantly longer to do and relies on the blogger being happier wrangling blogs – and coding, depending on what we’re doing.
    3. Typing the clues in to some form of blog – which assumes that the blogger has a format to play with (which I could do, but it’s easy to make a mistake, particularly by editing out Guardian errors, so I prefer to copy and paste).

    Bloggers on this site vary their blogs as we come with different computer knowledge. I know there are several of us who could blog by typing in html, as I do, but quite a few others rely on the helpfulness of WordPress which hopefully gives WYSIWYG surfaces.

    Now the Azed this week is a picture, so to get those words from that picture into a blog means copy typing or trying some form of OCR (optical character reading software), which relies on a clear version and proof-reading to check the results. Those clues then need converting into a blog, with answers and parsing. And that’s before we come to the issue of the grid – which as a picture needs picture manipulation (in GIMP) to add the letters, because the program we use cannot recognise the picture as a grid.

  14. I would suggest that the issue is probably largely academic where Azed is concerned. I can see no reason why anyone publishing online a puzzle which cannot be solved interactively would deliberately choose an image file over a portable format which maintains the integrity of its components, thereby making life harder not just for bloggers but for solvers. And as the publisher, why prefer a ‘lossy’ 459Kb file (2,757) to a lossless 58Kb file (2,756)? The option is clearly there to export in multiple formats (the front page image is an AVIF), so it looks to me like an ‘export error’.

  15. The new owners of The Observer have now confirmed that they will continue to publish the crosswords (Azed, Everyman, and Speedy) as PDFs, and also as online editable puzzles. From a blogger’s point of view, this is reassuring news. The decision by Guardian Media to publish this week’s Azed as a JPG file seems to have been a mistake.

  16. Shanne@13: Thanks for the clarification. I did not know how the blogs were produced. I wish all bloggers luck in the future.

  17. Like bridgesong, I assume the jpeg was a one-off mistake on the part of whoever uploaded the puzzle to the Guardian site rather than a deliberate change of practice. But in any case, well done to Shanne for her work in making it possible to blog this week’s Azed.

    I have to say that I was sceptical that it would be possible to convert the low-quality jpeg into a format that the blogging utility could read but her persistence has paid dividends. (The alternative would have been manually retyping all the clues and redrawing the grid from scratch. Ugh!)

  19. Pianoman, ObsPuzzles have stated… “For now, crosswords will be freely available at observer.co.uk”.

    “For now” 👀

  23. Why make it more complicated? It was fine as it was. I can’t download the new system.
    I’m clue number 10 across.

  25. Thank you, that was well hidden. I tried to find them using the site’s search function but it found nothing. The site needs a lot of work imo.

  26. Where can I find the solution to the Speedy crossword without having to wait a week? And how can I reveal the answers to individual clues?

  27. Right on, Christine, I am with you on these questions. Who knows what can happen within a week. Can’t wait that long.

  28. Trying to get used to the new Observer. Very unimpressed so far. The Speedy is still there but can’t find the solutions anywhere. Nor any comments. Can anyone help?

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