How to download London Times puzzles

July 17, 1998

Many people have been asking how to download the London Times puzzles. They are not as simple as the others because they are written in HTML format.

What you need to do is get a copy of the html document itself on your disk for puz2pil to read. The file MUST be saved with a .htm extension for puz2pil to recognize it. The process is further complicated because they use HTML "FORMS" to place the puzzle document inside another document. So when you save it, you must save the right document. The special trick is to first LEFT CLICK your mouse inside the window or frame you are interested in.

Then in Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01 you select "Save As File..." from the "File" menu.

In Netscape Navigator 3.01 you would select "Save Frame As..." after left clicking inside the correct window.

Once you have the file with a .htm extension, simply run "puz2pil filename.htm" in the directory where you saved the file.

Sometimes even the instructions above don't work. Another approach I have found to work is again LEFT click inside the proper window and then RIGHT click in the same window to pull up a menu. There should be a View Source option. Select that. This will pull up the source for the proper window in a separate viewer. Then use the File/SaveAs menu on that viewer to save the text. Make sure the file has a .htm extension and not a .txt extension before running puz2pil.