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Putting a printable puzzle in a parish bulletin or a school newsletter

ARLing s. r. o. · 18 September 2026

Filling the back page is a monthly problem with a small set of honest solutions, and a puzzle is one of them: it is read by people who ignore everything else on the sheet, it takes no editing, and it gives you a reason to print next month's issue. The practical difficulties are dull and specific. A picture pulled off the internet lands in your column at the wrong width and goes soft when it is scaled. Grey fills turn into mud on a parish photocopier. And the question nobody wants to ask out loud is whether you are allowed to print it at all, which for most puzzles found by searching is either no or unknown. This note works through the width, the printing and the licence, in that order.

The width decides everything

Newsletter layouts are built on columns, so the first question is not what the puzzle looks like but how wide it is. A puzzle block sized for one column drops in; a square image sized for a screen has to be scaled, and scaling a grid of thin lines is what makes it go soft.

Our weekly sheet is built around a block that measures 80 millimetres, which fits a single newsletter column, and it is delivered both as a page and as the block on its own, as an image 945 dots wide at 300 dots per inch. The image is the part that matters for a layout program: you place it at its measured width and never touch the scale.

Line work, not grey

A puzzle for print is line work in black and white. The instruction printed on our own sheet says it in five words: black and white, no grey. Grey fills are the first thing a photocopier ruins, and a grid whose thin rules have been rasterised at screen resolution is the second.

That is what 300 dots per inch is for. At that resolution the lines of the grid survive the printer instead of turning into a smudge, which is why the block is delivered at that resolution and at a stated width rather than as a screenshot.

Print at 100 percent

The most common way to ruin a good file is the print dialogue. Our sheets say the rule on the page: print at 100 percent, not scaled to fit.

Scale to fit is the setting that silently shrinks a page by a few percent to clear a printer's unprintable margin, and it takes the measured widths with it. The way around it is to ship the right paper instead of asking anyone to rescale, so each week comes as an A4 and a US Letter file, since A4 is 210 by 297 millimetres and US Letter is 215.9 by 279.4, which makes US Letter 5.9 millimetres wider and 17.6 shorter. The solution goes on the second page, so you can print it in the next issue or keep it.

What a licence has to say

Four things, and if any of them is missing, the answer is no. Whether you may print it in your publication. How many copies. Whether you may put it on your website. And whether you may resell it or claim it as your own.

Our weekly sheet answers them in one line printed on the sheet itself: print this puzzle in one publication, in as many copies as you print of it, not for resale as a puzzle product, and web use is part of the Pro plan. The one off pack for publishers answers the same questions in a written licence: a non-exclusive commercial licence that permits your own books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters and educational materials with no limit on printed copies, and prohibits redistributing or reselling the source files or the pack, uploading it to a marketplace and claiming authorship of the puzzles.

Two limits you should know before you rely on it. The same non-exclusive pack can be bought by other publishers, so it is not an exclusive right. And the duplicate check behind it covers the archive and books we compared, not worldwide novelty. For a single puzzle in a club newsletter there is also the free route: personal and non-commercial use is free with the credit line, and commercial use is what the subscription covers.

What we have not done

No sheet of ours has been printed on a real printer or set in anyone else's newsletter, nobody holds a subscription to the weekly sheet, and revenue is zero. So the widths above are measured in the files and in the build, not in a finished parish bulletin.

What does exist is the material: 52 weeks are built, from Monday 21 September 2026 to Monday 13 September 2027, 156 puzzles in 624 files. Every one of them carries the line that the puzzle has exactly one solution, found by the program that made it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I print the puzzle in as many copies as I print of my newsletter?

Yes, that is exactly what the licence line on the sheet says: print it in one publication, in as many copies as you print of it, with no resale as a puzzle product. The publisher pack says the same for your own books, magazines and newsletters, with no limit on printed copies.

What about putting it on the parish website?

Web use is not part of the basic plan; it is part of the Pro plan. For non-commercial personal use the free route needs the credit line on the picture.

What size image do I need for a single column?

A block 80 millimetres wide, supplied as an image 945 dots wide at 300 dots per inch, placed at that width without scaling.

Where to look next

If you want files to inspect before anything else, three evaluation samples are free, and the full pack of 25 puzzles on 7 by 7 grids comes with matching SVG, PDF, PNG and JSON files and the written commercial licence at 19 € including VAT. If what you want is one puzzle a week rather than a pack, the weekly sheet is at https://arling.sk/puzzle-post/bulletin/, 19 € a month for one puzzle or 39 € for three levels.

Sources. The facts in this note are numbered after our internal fact list and were checked on the publication date. If a source has changed since, write to support@arling.sk and we will correct this page.