simon_blow_snow wrote:
I am pretty sure it is just a simple gimmick from the magazine.
OK.
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As the puzzle stands you can easily solve all the grid values, even only using a pen.
That's good to know. It's one of the puzzles I got stuck on, so my first action was to go back to the original. I saw those cells with the letters and wondered whether they represented an additional constraint. Then I got to checking the puzzle and realized that I had made a mistake in transcribing the clues (changed a 3 into a 2). The puzzle is going well now, although I haven't yet finished it (restarted it at bedtime last night and got too sleepy about half-way through).
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(1) You can produce the text from the image via a proper OCR software.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any OCR software that will read non-Latin characters. I'm sure it's out there, but I wouldn't know where to find it, even if I could afford it.
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(2) From my experience babelfish is a much better Japanese to English translation engine than google, but even it is not half as good as a human translator with a mild knowledge of the Japanese language.
Good to know about babelfish. One that I have found to be excellent for Russian and German is at
www.promt.com . I wish it did Dutch.