We’re starting the year with even more updates to improve Penpa-Edit (and a mid-week update because of our excitement for them).

First, outside of the tools themselves, we’ve finished digitizing and adding links to all the Tapa puzzles on the site. We are now about 70% done with digitizing the full backlog of puzzles, and will be handling Masyu next. Thanks to Murat, Prasanna, and Grant who have been working with me on this project for the last several months. The current list of genres with complete backlog support is listed on our Penpa-Edit notes page.

Second, as suggested in this last post (Penpa-Edit updates), we’re starting to add more answer checking and solver support tools to different puzzle types. In that post, we asked for interested people to start to contribute to Penpa and improve the site. I’m excited to say that kieranclancy has joined the effort and already contributed initial tools for Star Battle and TomTom checking that we just uploaded this morning. The Star Battle tools check for row/region and adjacent touching aspects and highlights them for the solver if breaking the rules. The TomTom tools check for Latin Square constraints and in many puzzles for valid cage mathematical sets. In collaboration with swaroopg92, they’ve also added options to turn on/off the answer checking as we expect some solvers in competition mode may not want to be given these automatic reminders. This is available from the Settings menu under “Conflict Detection” which can be turned on or off (for a single puzzle or all puzzles).

Note that these updates are still in beta mode, and there are probably a few puzzles where they may not work or cause issues. So please tell us if you run into unexpected behavior.