About Printable Zoo

Printable Zoo makes puzzle sheets that are meant to leave the screen. Mazes, sudoku, dot to dot and colour by number, all free, all sized for a real sheet of paper, all with an answer page.

Who is behind it

Nora founded Printable Zoo and checks every sheet before it goes up. The mazes and sudoku come out of the site's own generators, so she solves each one to confirm it has exactly one solution and that the printed version is readable at the size it actually prints. Nothing goes on the site until it has been printed on paper at home, because a puzzle that looks fine on screen and comes out grey and cramped on A4 is not a printable.

How the sheets are made

The mazes and the sudoku are not scanned from a book and not drawn by hand. This site has its own generators, and every sheet is produced by them from a size and a number. That has one consequence worth knowing about: the puzzles can be checked by machine, and they are.

• Every maze is built so that exactly one route connects the entrance to the exit. There are no shortcuts and no second answer.
• Every sudoku is dug out of a complete solved grid one square at a time, and a square is only left blank if the puzzle still has exactly one solution afterwards. A sudoku with two answers never gets published, because the answer sheet would be a lie.
• Difficulty is a real property of the board, not a word on a page. An easy maze is a smaller grid. An easy sudoku genuinely starts you off with more numbers.

What gets checked before anything goes up

Generated does not mean unread. Every sheet is printed on ordinary home paper before its page goes live, because the failure that matters here is invisible on a monitor: lines too thin to survive a draft print, a grid pushed past the margin your printer cannot reach, numbers too small to read once they are on paper rather than on a backlit screen.

What this site does not do

There is no account to make, no email to hand over and no watermark on anything. The sheets are free and they stay free. If you want to know exactly what you are allowed to do with them, that is on the Licensing Policy page, and it is short.

Something printed badly, or a puzzle looks wrong? Tell us. A broken sheet is worth fixing the same day.