Summary: Creating a Hitori puzzle takes two settings — grid size and difficulty — plus a quantity and a click. This guide covers the Creator settings, styling, titles, layout, export, and how to scale from one puzzle to a full book.
Overview
Hitori is a shade-the-grid logic puzzle that reads as instantly different from Sudoku on a book thumbnail, while asking the same kind of deduction from the solver. For a publisher it is about as low-friction as a module gets: no word list, no images, no shape to design. You choose how big the grid is and how much of it gets shaded away, and the generator does the rest — including proving that each puzzle it hands you has exactly one solution and can be solved without guessing.
Required Modules
- Hitori — product page
Editions
- Lite makes the Hitori puzzle, exports the static formats, and includes Instant Puzzle Books — cell content is numbers only.
- Creative adds styling control over the numbers, canvas, cell fill and cell border, content variation (letters, colour-shapes or pictures instead of numbers), plus Puzzle Book Studio Creative — and it is the first edition whose licence lets you sell the puzzles you make (books, worksheets and printables for readers and end customers).
- Productivity adds Time Saver and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity, and extends the licence to selling or supplying puzzles to other publishers.
- Creative Interactive and Productivity Interactive add this module’s interactive lanes — interactive PDF, Puzzle Slides, and online play. See Puzzle Maker Pro Editions Explained.
Preparation
Nothing to prepare. Hitori needs no word list, no images, and no source content of any kind — the grid is generated from scratch every time. Open Puzzle Maker Pro and pick Hitori from the puzzle menu.
Choose the Grid Size
On the Main tab, set Grid size. Hitori grids are always square, so this one number sets both dimensions.
The range is 5 to 12, and the default is 8 (an 8 × 8 board). As a rough guide:
- 5 × 5 to 6 × 6 — quick puzzles, good for children’s books, warm-up pages, and the opening section of a graded book.
- 7 × 7 to 9 × 9 — the everyday range, and the natural one-per-page size.
- 10 × 10 to 12 × 12 — long solves for the back of a book or a dedicated hard title.
The numbers a grid uses always run from 1 up to the grid’s side length, so a 12 × 12 mixes single- and two-digit numbers and its cells must fit the widest one. A 12 × 12 also packs 144 cells where an 8 × 8 packs 64, so it needs materially more page width for the same legibility. Shortlist your trim size on that basis, then run a proof print before committing a whole book. Page size and how many puzzles sit on a page are set in Puzzle Book Studio, not in the Hitori Creator.
Choose the Difficulty
On the same tab, set Difficulty to Easy, Medium, or Hard. The default is Medium.
Difficulty controls how much of the board gets shaded, and more shading generally means a longer solve.
Set your expectations for the bands. The settings sit closer together than their names suggest: measured across the whole size range, Easy shades about 25% of the cells and Medium and Hard land between roughly 27% and 29%. If you want a book that visibly gets tougher, ramp the grid size, which is by far the stronger lever.
What difficulty does not change is whether the puzzle is fair. Every band is held to the same standard — the generator only accepts a grid that logic alone can solve completely — so a harder Hitori is a longer solve, never a less fair one. You can ramp a book’s difficulty without ever shipping a puzzle that needs trial and error.
Set the Quantity and Generate
Set Quantity to the number of puzzles you want, then click Create. Preview and the Demo tier always produce one puzzle regardless of the quantity you set.
Generation is fast — a single puzzle takes milliseconds even at 12 × 12, so a batch of 50 takes seconds rather than minutes.
Each run generates fresh random grids. There is no seed control in the desktop Creator, which has a practical consequence worth planning around: a run cannot be reproduced. If you later need one replacement puzzle to match a book you have already laid out, you cannot regenerate that exact set. Export and archive every batch — puzzle and solution images together — before you start laying out.
Change the Cell Content (Creative and above)
By default every cell shows its number — nothing to set up, and this is what Lite always produces. On the Content tab, a Creative edition or above can replace the numbers with something else:
- Letters — an A, B, C… alphabet instead of digits.
- Colour-shapes — a small inset colour swatch per number, not a full-cell fill (the solution page already uses a full-cell dark fill for the answer, so a full-cell colour would be easy to confuse with it).
- Images — your own pictures, picked from a grid or a list.
Whichever you choose, the puzzle plays exactly the same: two matching pictures, letters or colours repeat in a row or column exactly the way two matching numbers do, and the Play It Online edition of the puzzle shows the same content you printed.
How many items you need depends on the grid size. A 5 × 5 board needs 5 distinct items; a 12 × 12 needs 12. The Content tab’s minimum tracks whatever Grid size you have set on the Main tab. If you pick Images and select fewer pictures than the grid needs, generation stops with a message telling you exactly how many you picked and how many you need — it will not quietly print a board that mixes pictures and bare numbers.
On Lite, the Content tab is still there — you can see what it offers — but its controls are greyed out with a note that it needs Creative or higher. This is deliberate: it should be obvious that the feature exists, not merely absent.
Style the Grid
On the Style tab you can set four surfaces:
- Numbers — the font and colour of the printed numbers (or, when content variation is on, the font used for a Letters theme).
- Canvas — the page background behind the grid.
- Cell fill — the background of the cells.
- Cell border — the grid line colour and width.
Styling is a Creative feature; the shared workflow is covered in How to Customize Puzzle Designs in Puzzle Maker Pro.
Set the Layout and Title
The Layout tab holds the page-level controls, including Smart Titles.
Crop decides how tightly the grid is rendered: on, the image is cropped to the grid with no margin; off (the default), it keeps a small margin around the board. Choose based on how your book template handles its own page margins. The tab also carries the title placement controls and a per-collection Use branding toggle, which is off by default — switch it on if you want your branding template applied to this collection’s puzzle images.
Pick a title type from the Smart Titles panel. Hitori offers these options, each shown here as it resolves for an 8 × 8 Medium puzzle:
- Hitori — e.g. “Hitori”
- Hitori Grid Size — e.g. “Hitori 8 × 8”
- Hitori Difficulty — e.g. “Hitori Medium”
- Hitori Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “Hitori 8 × 8 Medium”
- Grid Size — e.g. “8 × 8”
- Difficulty — e.g. “Medium”
- Grid Size Difficulty — e.g. “8 × 8 Medium”
- Custom — free text; this is the default, pre-filled with “Hitori” plus the rules description
The same list is available for the Description field beneath the title, which defaults to the puzzle’s rules — useful on the first page of a book so solvers know what they are looking at. How the Smart Titles control itself works is covered in How to Create Smart Puzzle Titles in Puzzle Maker Pro.
Export
Choose your output destination and tick the formats you want — PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF, or any combination — then generate. Hitori writes a puzzle page and a matching solution page in each selected format; the pairs are produced together in the same run, so keep each pair together when you lay the book out. The solution fills the shaded cells solid and hides their numbers.
With Creative Interactive or Productivity Interactive you also get:
- Interactive PDF — one checkbox per cell, so the solver clicks cells to shade them on screen. The mark is deliberately translucent, so the number stays readable underneath — which matters here, because the number is what the solver is reasoning about.
- Puzzle Slides — an interactive PowerPoint deck with a bank of draggable shade tiles, for classrooms and presentations.
- JSON and HTML output — the data plus an exported HTML player, and a ZIP you upload to the BookPublisherTools WordPress plugin to publish playable Hitori puzzles on your own site.
Scale Up to a Book
Two shared tools take you from one puzzle to a finished book.
Time Saver (Productivity) generates the whole book in one pass. Because each row carries its own grid size and difficulty, a graded book is just a set of rows — for a 100-puzzle book you might use four rows of 25: 6 × 6 Easy, 8 × 8 Medium, 10 × 10 Hard, then 12 × 12 Hard. Hitori rows also support a built-in difficulty ramp across grid size and difficulty, which builds that progression for you. See How to Batch Create Puzzles with Time Saver.
Remember that every puzzle also has a solution page, so a 100-puzzle book is 200 interior pages plus front matter — comfortably past most print-on-demand minimums. Plan the trim size and the per-page slot count in the book tool, not in the Hitori Creator, which has no page-size settings of its own.
Puzzle Book Studio turns those pages into a print-ready book: Creative handles one collection, Productivity combines several. See Puzzle Book Studio Tutorials. On Lite you assemble with Instant Puzzle Books instead, which builds a book PDF from your current settings.
Outcome
You can now generate Hitori puzzles at any size from 5 × 5 to 12 × 12 and any of the three difficulty bands, swap the numbers for letters, colours or pictures on Creative and above, style the grid, set the layout and titles, export them in print or interactive formats, and scale a single puzzle into a complete book. New to the puzzle itself? Read How Hitori Puzzles Work.
FAQ
Which edition do I need to batch-create Hitori puzzles?
Productivity. It unlocks Time Saver, which generates many rows of puzzles in one pass, and Puzzle Book Studio Productivity for combining multiple collections into one book.
What formats can I export?
PNG, JPG, SVG and PDF puzzle and solution pages at every edition — tick the formats you want in the output settings. Interactive PDF, Puzzle Slides, JSON and HTML output require Creative Interactive or Productivity Interactive.
Can I make rectangular Hitori grids?
No. Hitori grids are square, so the Grid size setting controls both dimensions. The available range is 5 to 12.
Can I change the colour of the shaded cells?
Not in this version. Shaded cells are filled solid near-black and that surface is not exposed on the Style tab, so plan solution pages — and your paper stock — around a dark fill.
Can I put pictures or letters in the cells instead of numbers?
Yes, on Creative and above — the Content tab offers Letters, Colour-shapes, or your own Images. Lite stays numbers only; the Content tab is still visible on Lite but its controls are locked.
How many pictures do I need if I use Images?
As many as the grid size — a 5 × 5 needs 5, a 12 × 12 needs 12. Pick fewer and generation stops with a message telling you exactly how many you selected and how many you need, rather than printing a board that mixes pictures with plain numbers.
Do I need a word list or any other source content?
No. Hitori generates entirely from its settings, so there is nothing to prepare or load.
Can I regenerate the same set of puzzles later?
No. The desktop Creator has no seed control, so every run produces fresh random grids. Archive your exported puzzle and solution images as soon as a batch is generated.