Crossfire dictionary problems

[flight]

I'm struggling to get CrossFire to show me Fill possibilities from all of my word lists when I'm using the interactive Fill tab to actively fill a grid. I really hope someone here will weigh in with some wisdom so I can solve this problem...

I have three total CrossFire dictionaries (.dict files):

(A) MyEdits (whatever changes I make to B or C, right?)
(B) One dictionary comprised of two word lists that I merged into one (via CrossFire) (words all appear UPPER CASE).
(C) Default (CrossFire's dictionary) (words all appears as lower case)

I'm still so new to all of this that I've made virtually no changes to B or C that would be reflected in A (I believe).

In Preferences>Dictionary, the top-to-bottom order is ABC and B is primary. When I try to interactively fill the grid and select an empty word, the CrossFire Fill feature only shows me possible word choices from B (UPPERCASE words) and no words from A (lowercase words).

When I switch the Preferences>Dictionary order to ACB, the Fill feature only shows me possibilities from C, not B (regardless of which dictionary I make primary).

While leaving A at the top of the list (CrossFire recommends doing this), I've tried every permutation of dictionary order and primary selection, and all the ABCs yield exclusively words from list B (no Cs) while all the ACBs all yield exclusively C words (no Bs).

I'm pretty sure I read in the CrossFire resources that a higher-listed dictionary will pre-empt all lower-listed dictionaries, but how do you get CrossFire to see ALL of my possible words from ALL lists, simultaneously, while using the interactive Fill feature? I already merged two word lists in CrossFire (this became B), but CrossFire doesn't seem to let me merge its default list (C) with any other lists I add, so it seems I will always have one B and one C list, but I can never see words from BOTH of these lists at the same damn time, which is frustrating.

Am I missing something? Am I nuts? Must I simply run the interactive Fill with the ABC order, first, and then go to Preferences>Dictionary and change the order to ACB if I want to see possible Fill words from C? Is there some way to merge the CrossFire list with my other list/s that I'm missing, somehow? Are there other settings that affect this dynamic that I must change in order to get it to work? I feel like I've tried everything (I'm a pretty smart guy, I think), but nothing seems to work.

Someone please weigh in, thanks!

[cmcetta]

I don't think I can solve your problem but I can commiserate ... and assure you that you are not crazy. Crossfire is very good (once you get used to it) but the documentation leaves much to be desired. I merged the wordlist I imported from Cruciverb with a personal list and put the merged list in MyEdits. This was the only way I could get it to work. I can makes changes to the MyEdits list but when I try to edit the default list (for example to remove profanities) I get a message saying that the default.dict is a read-only file.

[flight]

Thanks for your sympathies, cmcetta. I suppose my dictionary problem pales in comparison to my inability to understand all of this word scoring business. It seems some of the highest scored words are some of the least used in published crosswords, and the higher-scored words seem to do anything but "sparkle". Maybe I should just zero out all the scores.

[stephenbishop]

Hi OP, I've worked with Crossfire word lists a lot. The aspect you didn't seem to mention is what Scores you gave to the words in your word lists. It may be that if you didn't add a Score (word;score) to each word then CF reads it as a zero. There is also a Minimum Score setting, so you may have that set to high if indeed your lists have scores.

[flight]

Thanks, but it wasn't anything to do with the scores: as I remain fairly confused about the entire concept of word scoring, I have given every word I've added to my list a score of 50. Regardless of that, I think it's working now. Maybe it fixed itself? I don't know and I kinda don't care at this point. But I remain baffled about the whole word scoring thing and I would love to just perform one massive rescoring operation where every word in every list gets a 50 and then be done with it. Seems that can't be done, though.

p.s. Who's OP?

[mixographer]

You are OP! It means Original Poster. But since crosswords don’t use twos, how could WE know?

[zvit]

when I try to edit the default list (for example to remove profanities) I get a message saying that the default.dict is a read-only file.

Open it in Notepad++. When you save, it will warn you that it's read-only and ask you if you want to open in Admin mode. Say yes and it will reopen in Admin mode and you will then be able to save it.