The Toronto tournament this weekend ran too smoothly, so I had too much
time on my hands and worked away on the tsh to-do list. From the release
notes:

* config autopair is slightly less finicky about format (Peter Keller).

- It used to insist on single spaces, but I'd never noticed. I don't
use autopair anymore myself, and encourage others to switch to Chew
pairings.

* "LOOK" command now uses SOWPODS2003 and TWL2006 lexica.

- lexicon files are large, and available as separate download if you ask me

* Spurious error messages generated when pairing odd divisions for multiple
rounds
(InitFontes, RoundRobin) are gone.

- Should have fixed this one a while ago.

* An error message is displayed if no divisions are defined in the
configuration file.

- Likewise. It would have helped catch the nonnative line break issue.

* tsh is much more tolerant of non-native line breaks in its
configuration and data files.

- ... which is now fixed. Thanks to Kath M. for pointing out the problem,
which mainly hit OS/X users who used Classic-compatible text editors.

* Using a configuration file marks it as modified,
so that tsh will choose it the next time it is run.

- Saves a bit of typing, but be aware that this is a small but significant
change in tsh's behaviour. If you are running multiple events in one
directory, make sure you look at the welcome message to see which event
you're in. I'll often run a test version of a live event, lagged by
a few rounds, to see if I can debug or improve pairings.

* If you can't remember a player's number,
you can enter it as "part-of-name1,part-of-name2"
For example, if "Chew, John" is the only person whose family name
contains "CHE", he can be referred to as "che,".

- I can't believe it took me this long to set this one up, either.
A good 10% of this weekend's players could not remember their
contestant numbers. You can now easily look them up e.g. by asking
for their scorecard "sc che,". Next time I get a break, I'll add
the same name matching feature to Addscore.

* When division sizes were close to the number of rounds being played,
it is easy for bottom-ranked players to clinch positions near the
bottom and be relegated to playing each other for several rounds. Chew
pairings now check for this condition and do not allow two players who
have already played each other to be separated from a flight of
contenders.

- It took me a while to figure out why this was happening, and I apologize
to those players who were stuck playing each other too often at the last
few events. After making the equivalent fix by hand in the first round
this morning, I coded it and it ran smoothly for the rest of the day.

Next major release will likely be in mid-September, for our Michael Wise
Memorial tournament, unless another user asks for something really cool
in the meantime.

John
--
John Chew (poslfit on MD) * jjchew@... * http://www.poslfit.com