The features described here are only available if you have purchased the Professional Grid Filler add-on, or one of the Professional bundles.
Select this option under Fill Grid on the Words menu to give you complete control over which words are used in the grid filling processes. When you start the fill you will be prompted for which of the possible words to use in each word slot. See Grid filling with manual word selection for more information.
In the Create New puzzle window you can choose, and then fill, a grid based on your choice of theme words. See the Fit Theme Words topic for details.
The Fill Grid window has an option to fill directly from a clue database rather than a word list.
In the Fill Grid window you can select more than one main word list to use; it will combine all the words in the selected lists when doing the fill. To select more than one list you can hold down the Ctrl key while clicking on the lists you want to use.
Select the Scoring tab of the Fill Grid window to set different minimum word scores for depending on the word slot length. This can be useful to ensure you have 'nice' words in the most prominent or longest word slots. You can also pre-select slots in the grid (before using Fill Grid) and set a custom minimum score just for those slots.
Select the Special tab of the Fill Grid window to set specific sequences of letters to be use as a Rebus - i.e. letters that appear in a single square. For example, if you use cat as a rebus, any word with the letter sequence cat will appear with cat in a single square. So a word like 'catch' would only take a 3-square word slot.
In the Letter/word substitutions box you can also make general substitutions (without putting more than one letter in a square) for making a variety of novelty fills. Enter each substitution in the form 'X=Y', where X is the letter or letters that you want to replace, and is the thing to substitute. The right-hand side (Y) can be blank if you want to do letter/word deletions.
Use Exclude words matching to exclude words matching a pattern, e.g. '*A*' to exclude all words containing the letter A. The match is performed case-insensitively on the solution word as it would appear in the grid (without punctuation).
Select the Advanced tab of the Fill Grid window to set various options for the filling process.
Option to view partial unsuccessful fill
Sometime the filler may not be able to find a fill. Select this option if you’d like the option to save the best effort (with maximum number of words it was able to fill).
Exhaustive recursion
Select this option to make the filling process try out every possible combination of words until it finds a fit or gives up. In this case the filler will never give up if a fill exists (actually there is still a very small probability of a false fail, but it’s less than 0.01% for almost all cases). The trouble with exhaustive recursion is that the filler can spend a lot of time ruling out rather unlikely situations. Deselect this option to use a non-exhaustive filling method that will spend less time ruling out unlikely possibilities. The downside is that the fill may then fail even though there is a possible solution.
Next word must be linked
Select this option to make the filler choose the next word slot to fill one with at least one intersecting word. If this option is deselected the next word slot must only have at least one intersecting word on one of its intersecting word slots.
Start filling from cursor position
Select this option to make the filler start filling from the word slot at the current cursor position. If you deselect this option the filler will analyse the grid and start filling from wherever it thinks is best.
Prefer filling longer words first
This option biases the choice of the next word slow to fill more towards long word slots. Use this if you prefer filling longer words first.
Show all matches at once with manual fill
If you select this option the Manual word selection window will list all possible words for each word slot, irrespective of the settings just below. When this option is not selected, only a subset of the words are shown (starting at a random place in the alphabet), which can be faster on slots with many matches.
Max words to find in one go
This sets the absolute maximum number of possible words for each word slot that the filler will find. If you are using Manual word selection this will also be the maximum number of word choices that you are presented with (unless you select the option above). With Automatic word selection the higher the number the faster the fill. However, higher numbers use up more memory, so use large number settings with caution. When you first ran the program the setting was set to a value likely to be OK with the amount of memory your computer has. Increase the setting if you install more memory or don't mind Crossword Compiler using up a large proportion of your memory. Higher settings also result in better score optimization.
Possible words/buffer size ratio
The actual maximum number of words found for each word slot is determined by the Max words to find in one go (M) setting, the Possible words/buffer size ratio (P) setting and the number of words in the word list of that word length (N). If N divided by P is greater than M then the maximum number found will be M, otherwise it will be N divided by P.
Avoid repeating substrings in different words
With this option turned on, the filler will never use a word when that word contains a string of letters that have already been used elsewhere in the puzzle. The length of the substring to check can be changed in the Avoided repeated substrings of length box. If this option is turned off, the program will still avoid duplicating words, but it won't for example avoid using "word"; and "words" in the same puzzle. This setting can also be used by Grid Insight if saved as your default autofill settings for the current puzzle or template.
Select the Save advanced settings as default box to save your settings to be used every time you fill a grid every time you use Crossword Compiler. Otherwise, your settings will be lost when you close Crossword Compiler.
You can use word scoring to avoid lower-scored words, and ignore words below your minimum word score. On the Exclude tab you can also avoid other words when filling, which may be useful if you are using un-scored word lists, or wish to avoid words that you have used recently.
Exclude words from blacklist will avoid vulgar/offensive/medical words in the blacklist that are not usually acceptable in standard puzzles. In the default list these will also be excluded by setting a minimum word score of 11 or higher, but the option can be used with anz list or combination of lists.
Exclude words from database can be useful to avoid words that you've used recently, i.e. by excluding words that you've recently added to a clue database. You can select to exclude all words in a specific database, or only words added after a specific date or in the last given number of days. After finishing a puzzle, you can add the words and clues used to a database using Add puzzle clues to database; for subsequent fills, you can then choose to exclude those words with a recently-used date.
The filling engines can make full use of modern computers, exploring multiple fills at once. The Threads tab in the fill grid window allows you to limit or fine-tune the resources that are used. For most users the default automatic setting should be fine. You may wish to reduce the number of threads if you want more of your computer free for other resources, or to keep it running cool, etc. Increasing the number of threads may in some cases be helpful if you want to explore many different solutions to a difficult fill at once but your computer does not have many CPUs. Using more threads allows more different initial starting words to be tested, potentially finding a fill faster than doing fewer deep searches.
Multiple threads are also used for Manual Word Selection, to check the fillability of the remaining grid and find the forced words. Using the Automatic setting, or number of threads equal to the number of CPUs, will generally give the fastest results.
The Timing tab in the Fill Grid window allows you to fine-tune how much time the filler spends doing various parts of the search. Changing these settings allows you to fine tune the trade-offs between getting rapid results and getting early identification of an impossible fill. If you don't want to worry about the details, the defaults should be fine for most people.
The first setting applies to all fills, and determines the time the filler spends analysing an initial partially-filled grid before attempting to continue filling. Increasing this number will make the filler slow to start, but in difficult fills will make it less likely that tight constraints in different areas of the grid later lead to dead ends. The default should be fine for rapidly identifying a local area that's impossible to fill.
The remaining settings apply to Manual Word Selection, and determine whether the filler does a deep check of each possible fit - taking longer to study all the words - or does a shallower search allowing all words to be checked more quickly. The checking happens in two steps: a 'quick' initial check, which can often quickly rule out many words, and a deeper check that can identify more difficult problems. There are separate settings for tweaking timings for identifying locally-forced word choice, and for deep checking whether a full fill is possible.
Using the Fill button's drop down menu option, you can save a set of fill settings with a name for easy re-use. The saved settings can be used by selecting them from the drop-down menu, and can also be accessed quickly using the drop-down menu on the AutoFill button on the main toolbar.