Form Friend Options

There are three sets of options that you can control, relating to cursor movement, saving forms, and server setup.

To access the options, choose “Edit→Options”.

Here are the cursor selection options.

By default, Form Friend stops when it reaches the end of the word, when you're typing letters or navigating using arrow keys. If you uncheck this box it will “wrap around” and jump from start to end, and vice versa.

Form Friend keeps a list of every word in each form, and when you reach the end of the list (using the Page Down and Page Up keys) it “wraps around” and jumps to the other end of the list. If you check this box, it won't wrap around in this way; it will just halt when it gets to the last (or first) word.

If you lock letters you may find it annoying to try and type in a letter and have Form Friend beep at you because the letter is locked. By default, Form Friend will jump those letters automatically when you're typing or navigating with the arrow keys. To turn off this behaviour, uncheck this box.

Here are the save options.

If you try to close a form, and there are changes in that form since the last time it was saved, Form Friend asks you if you want to save it. You can turn off this behaviour by unchecking this box.

If you clear a form with locked letters, you may want to be warned if the form has been modified since it was last saved, since clear will clear the locked letters too. You can turn off the warning by unchecking this box.

An empty form is a form that has been created, but has had no changes and has never been saved. When you create or open another form, you can use this option to automatically delete the empty form you were just looking at.

This option is useful if you find yourself using the Ctrl-+ and Ctrl– features (see the help on form interaction for more information) since that creates a lot of empty forms.

Here are the word list server options.

This should be set to the name of a server running the Form Friend word lookup server. This should be set correctly when you download Form Friend; however, if you need to change it, here is where you do it. If you run the server locally you will need to change this; note that using an IP address of 127.0.0.1 will work for local servers.

You should not need to change this. It controls the TCP/IP port used to communicate with the Form Friend dictionary server.

This controls the directory where the server will look to find the word lists it uses. This has no effect if you are not running the Form Friend word list server locally. If you are, then when you set this you should choose File→Save Settings as Defaults and then restart the server for the changes to take effect.

Here are the server options.

This should be set to the name of a server running the Form Friend server package. This should be set correctly when you download Form Friend; however, if you need to change it, here is where you do it. If you run the server locally you will need to change this; note that using an IP address of 127.0.0.1 will work for local servers.

You should not need to change this. It controls the TCP/IP port used to communicate with the Form Friend database server.

This controls the directory where the server will look to find the forms it makes available over the net. This has no effect if you are not running the Form Friend database server locally. If you are, then when you set this you should choose File→Save Settings as Defaults and then restart the server for the changes to take effect.

Here are the case options.

You can choose if letters in the form should be mixed case, upper case, or lower case.

Here are the miscellaneous behaviour options.

If you request an invalid form (e.g. a single right normal pentagon) Form Friend will not build it. If you check this option, Form Friend will instead build a similar form (always the same shape and size, but sometimes a different orientation or handedness or multiplicity). If you leave the option unchecked Form Friend will just warn you that the form shape requested is invalid.

If you have the above option checked, then you can check this option to ask Form Friend to warn you when it performs the substitution described above.

Here are the fill options.

When Form Friend looks up words, it can do so alphabetically, or it can retrieve the words in random order. It can be slower to retrieve them randomly, so this checkbox allows you to choose. If the words are not randomized, Form Friend will always return exactly the same form when asked to fill a form.

If you partially fill a form, Form Friend can be set to ignore those words and assume they're correct by checking this option. If you leave this unchecked, Form Friend will verify each word, and will fail to find a fill if the words you've entered aren't all in its list of valid words.

This option allows you to control how often Form Friend repaints the screen during a long fill. If you set this to 1, the screen will be repainted every time it tries a word. If you set it to 10, it will repaint every tenth time. Larger numbers allow Form Friend to spend more of its time looking for words and less time repainting the screen, but they give you less visibility into what Form Friend is doing.

Here are the info options.

Currently the only information option is Author: the value you enter here will be used as the default in the Form Information dialog box.

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Form Friend version 2.02 copyright © 2000, 2001 by lucifer@puzzlers.org