Hi
tarek,
Thank you for your constructive feedback. I have dealt with the main issues that you identified thusly:
- I have made clear above, as a "global rule", that "overlapped corners are always Sudoku boxes", ie always have 9 different values in the 3x3 cells
- Similarly, I have also made clear that "shaded AH's" are internally "contiguous", and where multiple AH's are used, these are always mutually disjoint
I am extremely reluctant to introduce extra grey-shades to distinguish AH's, and dead set against use of colours. I have a B/W laser printer, for a start. So, printer-friendly for me means newspaper-friendly.
Extra grey-shades will only work for some AH configurations, I have some designs in mind with up to a dozen AH's. But they will always conform to the "global rule" above, and so should present no problem to anyone who knows this.
The "ideal" of a completely self-contained printable grid that requires no annotations or specific instructions to interpret is one that I agree with, but for many of these "multi-mode" puzzles this will simply not be possible. The "overlapped corner" rule will often need to be applied, as Jigsaws (normal or otherwise) will always have some internal box outlines omitted.
If any puzzle has
SudokuP (disjoint groups) for any of the 5 grids, then this will require a specific puzzle note to that effect, since I do not do any special rendering at all for this mode. (I would actually like to combine P-mode with Jigsaw some time, and for this perhaps some visual cues might be necessary, we will see).
NC (non-consecutive), can apply to any variant, and this will always require a specific puzzle specification note.
The puzzle demo above can thus be categorised as "nearly ideal", in that it needs no specific puzzle-specific notes, if you accept the implied (and clarified) global rules. At least I think it does …
I do hope these necessary compromises will not prevent you from enjoying the puzzles!
Cheers
MM
PS: I am in fact already committed to using a 4th shade (white, black, grey1, grey2), which will be needed for Windoku modes, for example, and also for combined "Jigsaw + Sudoku Boxes" modes.