Black Ink 1.4: Printing Blitz

May 20th, 2011

Black Ink 1.4 is now available on the Mac App Store and direct from the Red Sweater Store.

Black Ink is great for solving puzzles on your Mac, but also a fine tool for printing supported puzzle formats in a professional-looking layout suitable for solving on paper. For Black Ink 1.4, I made major strives towards improving the printing features of the app. The major new printing feature is an option to “squeeze” everything for a puzzle onto a single sheet of paper. For larger puzzles this can create a grid and clue list font size that are quite small, but for many folks it’s a priority to get everything on one sheet for easy solving-on-the-go.

Also notable in this release is the return of user-customizable puzzle sources. I removed these in 1.3 because I thought it was more trouble than it’s worth for most users. But for those who do discover sources and are able to configure the settings in Black Ink, this is a much-missed feature.

Complete change list:

  • Printing improvements
    • Support a new “fit on one sheet of paper” print option
    • Support live-updating of print preview as settings are changed
    • Fix issues with printing when clue list printing is disabled
    • Fix a bug where some clues would rarely not get printed
    • Work around a printing issue on a pre-release version of Mac OS X
  • Other Fixes
    • Prevent possibility of crashes with some accidental keystrokes in puzzle view
    • Remove Houston Chronicle as it stopped publishing Mar 25, 2011
    • Prevent double-quoting titles of puzzles already in quotes
    • Further fixes for Mac OS X 10.4 functionality
    • Fix to show puzzle document names as “Black Ink Puzzle Document” in Finder
    • Restore ability to add custom puzzle sources to the default list

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2 Responses to “Black Ink 1.4: Printing Blitz”

  1. Sharon Salisbury Says:
    June 15th, 2011 at 8:23 am

    I purchased Black Ink and was able to work the puzzles for a while. The last daily puzzle was May 31 and there are other puzzles that will not download. Have I purchased this product unwisely.

  2. Daniel Jalkut Says:
    June 15th, 2011 at 8:37 am

    Hi Sharon – I’m sorry about the Thinks.com puzzles stopping. I’m hoping they will resume at some point.

    Unfortunately, I don’t have any control over the sources. The Black Ink application is a tool for solving puzzles, but doesn’t “come with” any puzzles per se. I make it available as a tool to take advantage of whatever puzzles you might find in the right format.

    I’m always trying to find new sources that will work right within the app, and hopefully things will get better again at some point. In the mean time, there are some other leads for puzzles you might be able to download directly and use with Black Ink:

    http://www.red-sweater.com/blackink/puzzles.html

    All of that said, if you decide it was a mistake to purchase, I’ll be glad to send a refund (or you can ask Apple if you purchased through the Mac App Store).

    Daniel

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