Crossword Puzzles

in Burmese and JavaScript

!

Nick Doiron — @mapmeld

About Me

This presentation

• Generating crossword puzzles

• Making it work with Unicode

• … is this a good idea?

Revisiting Crosswords

Data modeling

• Crossword puzzle is a 2D array{ letter: null || String, number: null || String } // accept Unicode numerals

Rendering• <canvas>var canvas = $(‘canvas’).get(0); ctx = canvas.getContext(‘2d’);

• When you set a letter, print embedded white square, then maybe a number

Placing words?

Random?

Seeking out matches

Seeking word matches

• Longest words first

• Shuffle previous words to spread out connections

• No prefixes, suffixes, or going parallel to previous words

NodeJS• npm install canvas!

• (need dependencies / buildpacks on cloud)

NodeJS• Making a Crossword object!

• Pass <canvas> element (Node or client) into Crossword constructor!

• Moving client-side events to function calls!

• CLI!

• npm install crossword -g

Not emoji

yes this talk is secretly about Unicode the not-fun parts

How I got into this

Current State of Burmese• I’m on the Unicode Myanmar workgroup

• iOS 10 supports Burmese!

• The JS Intl API

• Traditional calendar unsupported :-(

• Alphabet Team

Intimidating Linguistics Part

How Burmese works

မန #မန$မ% မ ြ န ် မ ာ

မဂ*လ%ပ-

င ် ္ ဂ ????

Rise of theGrapheme Cluster

RegEx to end all RegExes?

• No, use npm install regenerate

Numerals

• npm install myanmar-numbers block.number = shared_start || i18n_function( clue_number++ )

Is it a good idea?

hypothetical case-sensitive crossword

Is it a good idea? 54 variations

Is it a good idea?

Thank You !!Nick Doiron — @mapmeld