NYT Crossword Downloader

This tool supports downloading (and automatically printing) the NYT crossword puzzle. Using this script requires a valid login session for the NYT site. You will need to provide your cookies for nytimes.com in the Netscape format (that is also used by curl). This does not support bypassing any subscription requirements to access crosswords.

Prerequisites

• Python
• File with cookies (see: HTTP Cookies) for nytimes.com

Extracting cookies

The necessary cookies are the NYT-S and/or the SIDNY cookies from the NYT site. These can be found using browser dev tools and written to a file in the appropriate format. There may also be browser extensions that can export the cookies.

For Firefox users on Linux, the included extract-cookies.sh script can be run to extract the cookies from the Firefox cookies database. This requires Firefox to be closed; additionally replace aaaaaaaa.default-release in the following command with the path to your profile in ~/.mozilla/firefox. The script requires the sqlite3 command to be installed.

./extract-cookies.sh ~/.mozilla/firefox/aaaaaaaa.default-release/cookies.sqlite > cookies.txt

If you are unable to find the required cookies or if the cookies do not work after extracting them, make sure you are correctly signed in to the NYT website.

Running

To run the script, first install the dependencies from requirements.txt. This is probably best done in a virtual environment. Use pip install -r requirements.txt.

You can then run the script as ./download.py. Several command line flags are supported:

• --date, -d - The date (YYYY-MM-DD) of the puzzle (defaults to today's date, notably not the latest puzzle)
• --large-print - Fetch the large-print variant of the puzzle
• --left-handed - Fetch the left-handed variant of the puzzle
• --solution - Fetch the solution in addition to the puzzle (default to enabled)
• --print, -p - Automatically send the puzzle (and solution if chosen) PDF to the printer using lp(1)
• --out-dir, -o - The directory where PDFs should be written
• --cookies, -b - The path to the cookie file (defaults to ./cookies.txt)

So for example, to automatically print the left-handed variant of the July 14, 2022 puzzle and download to puzzles/:

./download.py -p -d 2022-07-24 --left-handed -o puzzles

Printing on Windows

On Windows, the default application for PDFs must support automatically printing. You can check if the registered default application supports this by checking if right-clicking on a PDF in Windows Explorer shows a "Print" option (you may need to select "Show more options"). If not, you will need to change your default application in the Settings app. You may need to end all tasks for the currently registered default in order to change it. If your current default is Microsoft Edge (which does not support printing), you may have to end the relevant Edge or msedge tasks from within Task Manager before changing the default app.

Another downside with printing on Windows is that the default PDF app may remain open after printing is done. Python does not provide any information about the launched process from its os.startfile function so, unfortunately, there isn't much to do about that.