How to Print Crossword Puzzles: Letter or A4

Printing a crossword puzzle should take less than a minute, and with the right settings it always will. Open the puzzle page and pick your paper size first: Letter for the United States and Canada, A4 for most of the rest of the world. Then choose a clue size — small, medium, or large — depending on who is solving. Large print is kind to young readers, older eyes, and anyone solving under classroom fluorescent lights.

Press Print Puzzle and your browser's print dialog opens with the blank grid, the clue lists, and nothing else — no menus, no ads, no website chrome. Press Print Answer Key and the same happens for the solved grid, on its own page, so you can keep the answers or share them fairly. That is the whole trick: the puzzle page and the answer page are printed separately on purpose.

Every modern browser can turn a printable page into a PDF without installing anything. In the print dialog, look for the printer or destination selector and choose Save as PDF (Chrome and Edge call it Destination, Safari and Firefox call it Printer or Save to File). The paper size and clue size you picked on the page carry over to the PDF, so set those first, then save.

A saved PDF is handy for all the reasons you would expect: emailing a puzzle to grandparents, loading one onto a tablet for a flight, or keeping a folder of backups for the classroom. The PDF prints exactly the same next month or next year, which makes it the safest way to archive the puzzles your class loved most.

Letter paper measures 8.5 by 11 inches; A4 measures 210 by 297 millimeters, which is slightly narrower and slightly taller. A crossword designed for one prints comfortably on the other as long as you tell the site which one you are using, because the grid and clues are sized to fit the page with margins to spare.

If the grid comes out cut off at an edge, the usual cause is a mismatch: the page was set to A4 while the printer expected Letter, or the browser's own paper size overrode the page setting. Set both to the same size and print again. Scaling options like Fit to page or Shrink to fit are safe to use with our puzzles — they will never stretch the grid out of square.

Print a double-sided copy when you want the answer key to ride along on the back of the puzzle — it saves paper and keeps the answers from getting lost in a desk drawer. For classroom sets, print one master and photocopy it; our grids are drawn in pure black and white so every copy comes out crisp.

Draft mode is perfectly fine for puzzles and saves a surprising amount of ink over a school year. The only thing worth full-quality printing is anything with large shaded areas, which our puzzles deliberately avoid. And if you are stocking a quiet-time corner, print five assorted puzzles at once and keep the stack in a tray with a cup of pencils — it will empty faster than you expect.