ChessMint: An online tool for offline training

I'll begin comme il faut: by appreciating the lichess puzzle database and the fact that it is freely and openly available to anyone.
I think it's an amazing resource for any chess player wanting to improve their calculation skills and trying to become a better chess player overall, and for many years it has been (and will continue to be) my default recommendation as a simple, effective, low-friction training method.

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However, at least for me personally, sitting in front of a screen has never been the ideal setting for a serious, fully focused training session. This is why I wanted to be able to create high-quality material for training sessions in the "analog world", away from screens entirely, with no distractions, just using a chess set, pen & paper.

Well, that's basically the whole idea of ChessMint. It lets you create chess training PDFs easily and comfortably: You select rating range, theme, and layout, and the PDF is generated automatically, filled with puzzles according to those parameters.
Also, you can request a second page to be generated with the solutions to the puzzles.

Additionally to what one might consider the main automatic mode, there is also a blindfold mode (puzzles are simply presented as text consisting of piece-square pairs) for visualization training, as well as a custom mode that expects FENs (and optionally data for title, author, date etc.) to be input. This latter mode is probably mainly of interest to coaches.

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I want to emphasize that this project is still in its infancy, which is why I define it as "being in beta", by which I simply mean that, for the moment,

• it's completely free to use
• it does not require creating an account
• it's not perfect (duh)
• feedback is much appreciated

(...this is also why I feel slightly less ashamed about writing a blog post this promotional in nature. But of course, if the lichess team decides that it is too much of an advertisement with too little value for the reader, I would understand/accept that decision fully)

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Well, without including the link this post wouldn't make much sense. Feel free to check it out —> ChessMint
(in case the link does not work: beta.chessmint.app)

(You can also follow ChessMint on x.com for updates, announcements etc.)

I hope this tool will be useful to some of you, and again, any feedback (feature requests, bug reports, etc.) is very much appreciated.
Cheers!

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Some notes on how it is set up technically:

• ChessMint uses a slightly modified version of the Lichess puzzle database
• Some of the puzzles have been filtered out based on rating deviation and and popularity to ensure a certain degree of quality and rating stability. Roughly 4,000,000 remain.
• Puzzles are sampled according to user-specified parameters (rating range + theme)
• The fetched data is processed for presentation (particularly FEN and the solution)
• The puzzle data is passed to one of several LaTeX templates, depending on which layout has been selected
• The templates use the chessboard LaTeX package to render the diagrams
• A LaTeX engine compiles the template to PDF
• This whole process runs on a server and the generated PDF is streamed back to the frontend, ready for download.