Welcome to Doug's Puz-to-Pzl conversion program.

This program, designed to be run under the IZL Interpreter, converts
crossword puzzles from the AcrossLite format to a format which can
be read by Tim Harvey's Crossword Converter.

The display panel consists of a file selector and two buttons,
Select and Switch.  The Select button selects the highlighted file
for processing.  The Switch button lets you switch between processing
individual puzzle files (*.PUZ) and processing puzzle list files
(*.PZT).

A puzzle list file is simply a text file that contains a list of puzzle
filenames, one filename per line, to be processed one after the other.
For example,

xyzzy.puz
zyxxy.puz
mypuzzle.puz

would be a valid puzzle list file.  The puzzles to be processed must
all be in the same directory as the puzzle list file, and you do have
to include the PUZ extension.

You can create a puzzle list file by typing in the puzzle names by
hand, but there's a simpler way.  Current versions of NDO contain a
utility call Directory Lister or DirList.  I've set up PUZ2PZL.IZL
to handle DirList output.  It automatically ignores the first line
if it contains a backslash (\), removes leading spaces, and chops
off everything after the first tab character.

So, to create a puzzle list file, you can simply put all your
puzzle files in one directory, use DirList to list the files in that
directory, and copy/paste the output from that into a text editor.
Then you have to save it to a filename that ends in .PZT; otherwise
PUZ2PZL.IZL won't recognize it.

I included one more option for those of you who really know what
you're doing.  On the PUZ2PZL menu there's an item called "Delete
Files As Converted".  This item will display with a checkmark beside
it if it's enabled.  If you select "Delete Files As Converted" with
an individual puzzle, it will convert that puzzle to PZL format and
then delete the original PUZ file.  If you select "Delete Files As
Converted" in puzzle list mode, it will delete each individual PUZ
file as it's converted, and then delete the PZT list file as well.
I included this so that you don't get a bunch of errors when you use
the Crossword Converter to convert a whole directory of puzzles at
one time.

The program does some miscellaneous cleanup on the input text.
Smart quotes (ASCII 147 and 148) and Mac-style apostrophes (ASCII 146)
are replaced with regular quotes and regular apostrophes, respectively.
Any other characters with an ASCII value greater than 126 are deleted.

Tim wanted me to include a feature that would let you edit the puzzle
title, because that winds up being the name of the NDO puzzle file and
so gets truncated to 32 characters.  I didn't include it in this version
because I'm lazy.  If you decide it's a vital feature, let me know; I'll
grumble a lot and then see what I can do.

Doug Taylor
doug-taylor+@osu.edu
