I am neither good at crossword puzzles nor at making them. I am curious about how hard it is to make a simple one. I'm planning to put together a sort of acti

I am neither good at crossword puzzles nor at making them. I am curious about how hard it is to make a simple one. I'm planning to put together a sort of activity book for a user group meeting this fall, for the open source package "RDKit", which is used in cheminformatics and related fields. I thought it might be fun to have a cheminformatics crossword puzzle, with words and ideas from my field. For example, "Ran for US President" with the answer "[Au].O"; those being a way to denote "Gold" and "water" in the SMILES notation. Saying with SMILES, there are some interesting permutation possibilities, like O=S or S=O for sulfur monoxide. With a theme around, say, edible chemicals (caffeine = "Cn1c(=O)c2c(ncn2C)n(C)c1=O" and permutations thereof, vanillin = "c1(C=O)cc(OC)c(O)cc1", etc). So I've got an esoteric theme, and am looking for pointers on how to put them together.