You're absolutely right, martin. I'm very familiar with Azed's Playfair puzzles. I'm just saying that deducing the codeword for this one would have been beyond me.
I'm unfamiliar with this type of crossword. Is it best to solve all the normal clues. This presumambly would give you the italicised in their jumbled form?
You then have to try and decode them to give you the codeword?
That's what I did, DJA. By Azed standards, the clues are reasonably straightforward. You will then have pairs of "real" letters that correspond with encoded pairs, but with a lot of gaps. That's when the fun starts.