Themed Crossword: Back Drops (PUZ) (PDF)
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I’m making slow but steady progress on the Autofill Manual Fill Project. I adjusted scores on my Default with Spaces wordlist and have started fortifying it with entries from the all-caps default list. I recently completed entries through eight letters in length, bringing Default with Spaces to 146,000 entries. The crossword in this post was a test of the word list in progress.
Roughly 40% of the entries in all-caps default are deleted or scored as unusable. The unusable entries are not added to Default with Spaces but kept in Default for administrative purposes. I adjust formatting in Microsoft Word, which has a decent interface for changing letter case. I do need to watch Word’s auto-formatting settings, particularly for apostrophes. CCWIN has some problems handling “smart” quotation marks.
The conversion process gets more laborious at this point. The Default with Spaces list is based on a list that was thoroughly developed through the eights not not much beyond that. My default list contained about 3,000 eight-letter entries not already in the Default with Spaces list. It contains over 32,000 unmatched nine-letter entries! Default with Spaces is usable for themed puzzles that don’t have many long entries in general fill but it is far from adequate for an Unthemely.
life as a puzzle 