JCSM Shareware Collection 1996 September

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Text File | 1992-12-03 | 14KB | 280 lines

WORDFIND This is the documentation for WORDFIND Version 8.1S. WORDFIND is a system to assist you in finding words for crossword puzzles and for other types of word puzzles such as acrostics and cryptograms. The system consists of this file, WORDFIND.DOC, the executable program WORDFIND.EXE, and 19 word files: Y2, Y3, Y4, . . . Y20. The file Y2 contains 2 letter words, Y3 contains 3 letter words, etc. The executable program is an MS-DOS program and will run on MS-DOS computers, even if they are not IBM compatible. WORDFIND (Copyright 1992, Castle Oaks Computer Services) is a shareware program which has been distributed for trial use only. This is an unregistered copy. You should register. You may share it with others as long as you advise them that if they use it, they should register also. The registration fee is $15.00. Send it to: Castle Oaks Computer Services P. O. Box 36082 Indianapolis, IN 46236-0082 When registering, include in the registration letter, name, address and telephone number. After the registration fee is received, a registered copy of the latest version of the program will be sent and your name will be placed on our list of regis- tered users. Registered users will be notified of any updates to the software or word files and any other programs being offered by Castle Oaks. The word files have been abstracted from a dictionary of words provided by Public Brand Software. INSTALLATION The files needed for the system total over 400,000 bytes. Nor- mally, WORDFIND is distributed on two 5.25" floppy disks or one 3.5" disk. (Some vendors may condense the system into a .ZIP file and distribute it on one disk.) If you do not have a hard disk, make working copies of both disks and store the distribution disks for safe keeping. No other installation is necessary. Use disk one if you wish to find words whose lengths are 9 or fewer letters. Use disk two to find words that are 10 to 20 letters in length. Normally, on a floppy based system you will boot up with a system disk in drive A:, you may then place either working disk one or two in drive B:, log to drive B: and run WORDFIND. If you have a 3.5 inch drive (either 720K or 1.44M) or if you have a 1.2M 5.25. inch drive, the entire system can be placed on a single disk. If you have a HARD disk, make a directory called WORDS (or you may choose any name you wish), change directory to WORDS and copy both disks one and two to this directory. Store your distribution disks for safe keeping. USAGE Before running the program, log to the drive and/or subdirectory containing the executable program and the word files that are to be searched. Then to run the program, the general form of the command line is: WORDFIND [<template>] [<file-prefix1>] [<file-prefix2>] ... [<file-prefix10>] The parameters in brackets are optional. If you include a tem- plate on the command line, it must be the first parameter and it must include at least one wild card character. (Never use ':' or '\' as a wild card in this template.) A template word is a series of known letters in known positions with wild card charac- ters in the positions where the letters are not known. Any non- alphabetic character may be used as a general wild card character except '-', '=', '+', '~', '(', '^', or '!'. These are special wild card characters that will be explained later. Suppose the puzzle definition given is "riddles" and you know it is a seven letter word with the 2nd, 4th, and 7th letters being N, G, and S, respectively. The template word you would enter would be: ?n?g??s (Note: either upper or lower case may be used.) The program will return the list: ENIGMAS KNIGHTS ONAGERS You must then decide which of these words best fits the puzzle definition. The more known letters you have, the fewer will be the matching words; and conversely, the fewer known letters you have the more possible words will be found. The display will pause if more than 24 lines are needed to show the words. You may initiate another 24 lines by pressing the space bar (or any key other than the 't' key). Pressing the 't' key will terminate that search and prompt you for a new template word. If you wish to terminate the program, just press the carriage return without entering a template. The special wild card characters provide additional search capa- bilities. The special characters: '-', '=', and '+' are used to specify that the unknown character is a duplicate of one or more other characters that have the same wild card. If you know a word has duplicate characters (but you do not know what they are) you may use any one of the special characters to indicate dupli- cates (or triplicates, etc.) This is especially useful in solv- ing cryptograms. Suppose for example you have a 6 letter word and you know the 1st and 3rd letters are the same, the 2nd and 5th letters are the same, and the 4th letter is a "B". The template could be: -=-b=? The word list returned will be: MAMBAS MEMBER From other clues, you must decide which of these words is the correct word. Note that in the example given, if there had been a word in the vocabulary that matched the template with the final character agreeing with one of the duplicate characters, it will not be displayed. WORDFIND does not allow a character in a position marked by a general wild card to match a character in a position marked by one of the special wild cards that are used for dupli- cates. The special wild card, '~', is provided so that you can exclude matching characters in positions other that just those marked with the special duplicates wild cards. This is also useful in solving cryptograms. The template, ??-=-B=?, will yield: HEALABLE SCALABLE SCALABLY SEALABLE; whereas, the template, ~~-=-B=~, will only return: SCALABLE SCALABLY The other two words have duplicate letters in the second and eighth positions. The special wild cards, '(' and '^' are provided to allow you to specify that the unknown character is to be either a consonant or vowel, respectively. Thus, the template, (^(^( would cause all the 5-letter words with the pattern consonant-vowel-consonant- vowel-consonant to be displayed. A new feature introduced in version 8.1 is the capability provid- ed by the use of the special wild card '!'. When the program de- tects one or more '!'s in a template, it prompts the user for a list of characters. The positions marked by the '!' are limited to these characters only. Suppose that you have the letters, AELST in an anagram; by entering !!!!! as the template and AELST as the desired character table, WORDFIND will return 44 different words that use only the given letters. Most of these words can be eliminated because they contain repeated usage of some of the letters. This feature can assist you in solving anagrams con- sisting of several words. In a recent JUMBLE (R) puzzle, the letters in the final answer were: BDEFGILM (D appeared twice and I appeared three times) and the answer required you to fill in: A ___ "__" in the ______. By using the template: !!! and the above list of characters, the solver can display all the possible 3 letter words. This proce- dure displays many words. Most of them can be eliminated because they contain repeated letters other than M or I; and some are abbreviations or implausible words. In a like manner, you can find all the possible 2 letter words and 6 letter words. The answer, in this case, turned out to be the phrase 'A BIG "IF" in the MIDDLE'. The string of letters that you supply can be in either upper case, lower case, or mixed. They do not have to be in alphabetic order, and each letter needs to be entered only a single time. Once you have entered a string of characters, it is not necessary to enter them again. When the program prompts for a string of characters, if you press ENTER only, the previously entered string will be used. If you do this before any characters have been specified, the program uses the entire alphabet which makes the '!' act just like any general wild card. There are several other uses for this feature. If you are creating puzzles and you would like to use letters that only appear in a name (such as GEORGE WASHINGTON) or a phrase (such as HAPPY NEW YEAR), this feature provides that capability. Or, say, you want words that only contain the vowel, 'O'; you would enter BCDFGHJKLMNOPQR- STVWXYZ (note, AEIU are not included.) If you are playing a board game such as SCRABBLE (R), (and if other players allow it), you can enter the letters from your playing tiles and then dis- play all the two, three, four, etc, letter words that use your letters. The command line parameters denoted by <file-prefixn> are provid- ed to allow you to search files other than those provided with the program. The word files provided are named Y2, Y3, ... Y20 and they are in a special condensed form to save space. The file format is such that it is not practical to modify them or create new files with an editor. However, when you register, you will be supplied with utilities for creating or modifying the word files. CASTLE OAKS also sells an auxiliary vocabulary of word files. This vocabulary is not shareware and it contains an additional 290,000 words and phrases. Only a few of the words in this auxiliary vocabulary are present in the standard vocabulary. The cost of the auxiliary vocabulary is $50.00. WORDFIND always looks for a file from the standard vocabulary first. You may find it desirable to create or acquire some additional word files to use with WORDFIND. If so, they must have names of the form: XXXXXXn where XXXXXX may be any 1 to 6 character root name you choose followed by a numeric value 2 through 20. (The entire name including the numeric part must not exceed 8 characters. There- fore, the non-numeric part must not exceed 6 characters.) The file must not have an extension. Until you get the auxiliary files or the utilities to make your own, the only practical application for being able to enter file-prefixes on the command line is the following: Suppose that you have a floppy based system having two 360K drives. You could put the floppy containing the executable program and the files Y2 through Y9 in drive A:, and the floppy containing the files Y10 through Y20 in drive B:. Then log to drive A: and issue the command: WORDFIND B:Y This will cause WORDFIND to look on drive A: for the appropriate Y file, whether it finds it or not, it will also look on the B: drive for the file. It will find the required file on one or the other drive. Note that you can include in a file-prefix a drive letter and sub-directories if needed. Whenever a search is made, an appropriate file is opened and the entire file is read into memory. In the worst case, (a 4.77 megahertz, 360K floppy based computer searching the file Y8), the search will require several seconds. Displaying words is slow in comparison to searching, therefore when the search finds many matches, the process is significantly slower than when only a few matches are found. If you have a faster computer and/or a hard disk or faster floppy drives, the search will take less time. If the first letter of the word is known, the search will terminate after all words starting with that letter have been searched. Another interesting application of WORDFIND is in creating poet- ry. For example, to find words which rhyme with "ate", you can search for all words ending in "ate", "eight", and "ait". This will require searches of various possible word lengths. These searches will find over 1000 words. Not all of these words will actually rhyme with "ate" but the poet can easily choose ones that do. When you register, you will also receive the free program, UNAGRAM. This program unscrambles any anagram if the word is in one of the vocabularies. Using UNAGRAM is almost like cheating since it does all the work for you.