2024.7.20

I waited too long between releases! I think most users have been building from this repo, but I am hoping to keep the actual releases from lagging this much in the future.

What's Changed

Instead of a huge bulleted list of PRs, I'm going to pull together the changes by category.

• Outlets fixed: A few issues with McKinsey, New Yorker, Guardian, Daily Beast, and Crossword Club have been fixed! If you're having issues with one of those, try this latest version.
• Outlets added: Puzzmo and Daily Pop are now available with keywords pzm and pop, respectively
• Outlet removed: Alas, I've had to pull Wall Street Journal for now, as they've ramped up the anti-automation tech on the site. Tracking this issue in #178, suggestions welcome.
• Outlet removed: I've also removed the Modern as it is now behind a paywall. Puzzle Society is a great subscription, and I recommend it! Hopefully will figure out a way to authenticate for subscribers, as we do with the NYT.
• New feature: Improved emoji handling and a new command line option --preserve-html to leave source HTML intact. The default remains converting it to markdown, but now you can choose not to.
• New feature: It's now possible to pass arbitrary settings at the command line. This is probably not useful for anybody but me, but it might open up some fun options in the future.
• Behind the scenes: All dependencies bumped to latest versions
• Behind the scenes: I'm now running a GitHub Action to check that xword-dl builds successfully and can download a puzzle from a bunch of different outlets (and with a bunch of different characteristics) on each PR and also daily. This has already helped me catch changes on the site end, and should help prevent regressions on existing downloaders.

New Contributors

• @afontenot made their first contribution in #191

2023.12.2

A few bug fixes and a fix for some new stuff Amuse Labs is doing. If you're trying to download an Amuse Labs puzzle (such as LA Times, New Yorker, Vox, Newsday, and others) and getting a "Crossword puzzle not found." error, this is the update for you.

Also finally got a chance to include a new downloader contributed by @Twirlip-of-the-Mists, who tells me it's their first-ever open source contribution! How about that! 🎉 This downloader adds support for three different offerings by Michael Curl at Simply Daily Puzzles, which is also syndicated as Best For Puzzles.

What's Changed

• New Yorker: fix encoding error for theme titles by @thisisparker in #147
• The Modern: fix typo in initialize function by @thisisparker in #149
• Amuse Labs: fix for moved parameters by @thisisparker in #151
• Added downloader for https://simplydailypuzzles.com/ by @Twirlip-of-the-Mists in #130

New Contributors

• @Twirlip-of-the-Mists made their first contribution in #130

2023.11.10

This release includes two small changes to the AmuseLabs downloader: one essentially a bugfix for the last release (fixes #142), one accommodates a small change that Amuse seems to have made upstream in their JS.

2023.10.26

The main thing here is this release should be able to download from some AmuseLabs solvers that had begun to elude it over the past day or so — so if you're trying to download from an embedded AmuseLabs solver, and it's not working, give this a go! Also included are a few improvements to how WSJ and USA Today puzzles are handled for a little better reliability.

What's Changed

• USA Today: improve error handling and latest puzzle search by @thisisparker in #134
• WSJ: run fetched text fields through unidecode for inclusion in puz by @thisisparker in #136
• AmuseLabs: add new key-finding technique by @thisisparker in #140
• USAT: add check for malformed xml data by @thisisparker in #141

2023.10.1

This one's a minor release that I wanted to get out the door before a little travel, but it should fix USA Today (which had been a little flaky of late!) and WSJ downloads. WSJ appears to be publishing their Friday contest puzzles without solutions, and I've learned how to correctly indicate in a .puz file that no solution is provided; most puz clients will correctly hide the option to "reveal" from such a puzzle.

I've gotten some downloaders submitted by other members of the community recently which is very cool! It takes me a little bit to test those and merge them in, but the next release should include them and I'm psyched.

What's Changed

• WSJ: fix for when description field is set to null by @thisisparker in #129
• WSJ: Better handle Friday contest puzzles by @thisisparker in #132
• USAT: add alternate downloader by @thisisparker in #133

2023.9.5

What's Changed

• Fix for embedded AmuseLabs downloads that may have otherwise broken today
• Better support for Atlantic puzzles, including Caleb's Inferno
• A minor bugfix in the NYT downloader, and (pour one out) the removal of most of the NYT Variety options
• New support for titles in New Yorker's themed Fridays! Thanks for the request @edsantiago
• Bumped version numbers for each of the dependencies
• fix McKinsey crossword downloader by @iNtEgraIR2021 in #114

New Contributors

• @ehcloninger made their first contribution in #117. It's actually more than that though — he's also submitted full new downloader and I just haven't had a chance to review!

Full Changelog: v2023.7.2...v2023.9.5

2023.7.2

This release:

• Fixes New Yorker downloads with a new selector. Thanks to @edsantiago and Norah Sharpe for reporting!
• Fixes certain WSJ downloads by doing some filtering for non-puzzle posts. This bug reliably appeared for a few hours each Saturday morning, and is now fixed.
• Behind the scenes: Starting with this release, the Python packaging and repo tagging should be done automatically with a GitHub Action. I'll still manually write these release notes, but the upshot is that releases may be a bit more frequent as more of the overhead is offloaded to the computer.

2023.4.3

• Circles will now be correctly saved for outlets that encode their puzzles behind the scenes as .jpz. Thanks to @boisvert42 for that fix! The ruling on the field is this does not violate his sworn commitment not to work with .puz files.
• The McKinsey Crossword now works again, thanks to a fix from @iNtEgraIR2021 (who originally contributed that downloader, too)
• Crossword Club now supported thanks to a contribution also by @iNtEgraIR2021

2023.1.31

Small maintenance release here fixes some AmuseLabs downloads that are using a new variable name convention to store puzzle data. I'd observed at least Los Angeles Times and some blogs using the new format, and everything I'd encountered that doesn't work before works again with this release.

2023.1.25

Small release adds search-by-date to The Modern (thanks to @boisvert42 for the PR!) and should restore WSJ downloads. The story on that: they changed their URL structure a bit last week (as flagged in #93) and I released a new version of xword-dl to match, and as of this week it looks like it's back to the previous structure. The new code should work for both, in case it switches back.