[ktvt] Fw: A Brief Introduction to the New Features in Version 11 of Kurzweil 1000
- From: "Vy Pham" <missyguide@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ktvt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:46:30 -0500
----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen Baum To:
k1000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Monday, November 13, 2006 2:58 PM Subject:
A Brief Introduction to the New Features in Version 11 of Kurzweil 1000
This is from the blog - since I'm not entirely sure how many people are out
surfing the broader Internet, I thought I'd repeat it here - with a few
expansions.
I'm going to provide a long list of new features now, with very little text
about each one. It will be about as interesting as a shopping list. You can
check the blog ( www.k1000eng.blogspot.com) for additional information, or you
can just ask questions on this list.
Here goes...
Form Recognition. For the first time (I think), a Blind user has a shot at
being able to take a paper form, convert it into something electronic, fill it
out, and print the filled out version, all without assistance. The software
will automatically identify various types of fields in a form, including check
boxes, text boxes, and character boxes, give you a couple of different
mechanisms to explore and fill out the form, let you insert a signature into a
field if you wish, and let you print a filled out copy of the original.
Scanner Buttons. Finally, you can set up the buttons on a scanner to do useful
things in Kurzweil 1000. One might bring up the product if its not already up
and scan a page, another might bring up the Fax Application, a third might
bring up the Photocopy application.
Updated OCR Engines. Major new upgrades of Abbyy FineReader (now at version 8),
and Nuance's ScanSoft OCR (now at version 15) are included in this version.
An Appointment Calendar. We've written a new talking application - an
appointment calendar. You can invoke it from Kurzweil 1000, or run it
separately with a hot key. Its relatively simple, but does, I hope, much of
what one would want from this soft of application.
Scan and Recognize from within Microsoft Word. We've been asked about this for
several years, so we thought we'd finally get around to it. You can select from
a variety of K1000 options within Microsoft Word, scan pages, and have
recognized text flow into your current Word document.
Bookmarks and Notes in All Document Types. One of the most popular features of
Kurzweil 1000 has been our ability to create notes, multi-level bookmarks, and,
of course, keep track of where you stopped reading. This has only been
available, however, when you read documents in our native format - KES, or in
DAISY 3 format. Now, if we can open the file, we can also maintain this sort of
information for the file, regardless of its format.
Play Audio Files. Speaking of opening files, Kurzweil 1000 can now open and
play DAISY 2 Audio files, WAV files, MP3 files, and WMA files. Given the
previous item, you can also make notes at various spots in those files, and
create bookmarks for them.
Link Documents and Settings. You've been scanning a document, but you are
interrupted. You come back to it later, but realize you've forgotten what the
scanning and recognition settings were. Not a problem with version 11. If you'd
like, you can have the K1000 automatically create and load settings files that
are associated with a document. In one flavor of this new setting you can have
it keep track of just scanning and recognition settings. In another flavor, you
can have it keep track of just about everything.
Writing Files onto a CD. You've been able to create audio DAISY documents for a
few releases now, but had to use other software to actually write those
documents to a CD for use in a portable player. Now you can write them directly
to your CD from within the product.
Bilingual Dictionaries. Kurzweil 1000 comes with the American Heritage
Dictionary, 4th Edition. You can also get the concise Oxford Dictionary for it,
if you'd like. With this version, we include 12 pairs of bilingual dictionaries
- useful if you want to get a short definition in English for a Spanish
document, for example, or the French word for an English one.
Insert Signatures into Documents. I mentioned signatures with the forms
recognition feature. You can scan signatures into the system, save any number
of them, and insert them into any open document.
Conversion Settings. For people who want to influence some of the nitty-gritty
details of opening and saving documents in formats other than KES, this
settings dialog will be the place to go.
An altered TTS Engine. We've shipped IBM TTS for a number of years. With this
release, we are switching to ETI Eloquence.
Recognition Optimization. This new option works somewhat like scanning
optimization, except that it uses the image associated with the current page,
and runs it through several different recognition settings.
Table Output in HTML and DAISY. Previous releases did not support table
formatting when you saved documents as HTML or as DAISY. Version 11 supports
this.
Read Newly Recognized Pages Setting. If you are reading your mail, you might
like to have reading begin at the top of whatever page you have just scanned.
There is a setting that allows you to do that if you wish.
Searching for Blank Pages. In the Fine dialog, you can now search for blank
pages. A blank page is one that contains no text, or only spaces, new lines,
and tabs.
Enhanced Explore layout. Explore layout now distinguishes between headers,
footers, captions, tables, titles, and normal text blocks. Further, you can
choose to save a picture region as a TIFF file.
Bigger Recently Opened Files List. The number of items in this list has been
expanded from 5 to 10.
Continuous Reading in ListViews and TreeViews. Within any dialog that contains
ListView or TreeView controls, you can read the contents of those controls by
pressing F5. You can stop at any item by pressing F5 again.
Expanded use of Batch Scanning Prefix. In previous releases, you could use this
setting to begin each TIFF file name with a unique prefix when you were
scanning images. This was handy mainly because you could differentiate between
one set of images and another. You can still do that, but you can also specify
a folder name in the prefix, directing image files to a particular location,
and (later), processing images from that location when you choose to recognize
image files.
Extract All Images. This is a new option in the File Utilities menu, allowing
you to extract the images from all of the pages in a document.
New Features Guides. The Help menu contains a submenu called New Features.
Within that, you will be able to open any of the New Features guides for any of
the versions of Kurzweil 1000 that were on your computer.
Suggested Dictionary Lookup. If you misspell a word when you attempt to look it
up in the dictionary, Kurzweil 1000 may suggest possible corrections that are
available in the dictionary.
Copy the Entire Definition. Once you have looked up a word, use Control+W to
copy the entire definition to the clipboard.
A Few More Verbosity Settings. You can now be notified, if you wish, when
recognition of a multi-page file is complete, or when creation of audio files
are complete. You can also create a chime to be played when continuous reading
passes an end of paragraph, and/or a blank line.
Read All Punctuation. A few dialogs have been changed to always read with all
punctuation audible. This is handy, for example, in the edit corrections and
edit pronunciations dialogs.
Switch Currently Active Document. We have added a new item to the reading
keypad. Shift+Up Arrow will move you from one document to the next, presuming
you have more than one document open.
Stealing Focus after Scanning. TWAIN Interfaces have a nasty habit of changing
the keyboard focus when a scan begins. Kurzweil 1000 tries to compensate for
this by saving the keyboard focus when a scan begins, and refocusing the
keyboard once the scan ends. This causes trouble if you are using the Scanner
Hot Key sequence in another application, and manually change the keyboard focus
while a scan is in progress. You can now disable this behavior in the ScanConf
diagnostic by changing the value of the setting labeled "Keep Kurzweil in
Foreground".
Changed Behavior for Control+T. Using Control+T, of the "Tools->What Time is
It?" menu item, always gave you the time and the date. Now it will do one or
the other. Press it once, and you will get the time. Press it again within 10
seconds, and you'll get the date. This is a handier approach, especially when
used in conjunction with Control+C and Control+V, which will copy and paste the
date or time into your document.
Changed Defaults. Scanner Threshold now defaults to Dynamic rather than to
Static. Language Identification now defaults to Disabled rather than Once per
Page. The default Reading and Message Voice volumes are now 80 (some voices
exhibit bad behavior when driven at their maximum volume.)
Changes to Font Properties Dialog. In previous releases, we combined the bold
and italic attributes for a font into one setting called a font style. That's
unusual, and it turns out there is a good reason why it isn't done that way. It
becomes difficult to, for example, remove the bold attribute of a block of
selected text without affecting the italic attribute in the same block. So,
we've separated it out into a Bold setting and an Italic setting. Each has two
possible values usually: Enabled or Disabled. For the Font Format dialog,
though, if you select text that has both states of those attributes, you can
end up with a third possibility: Mixed. For consistency, the print properties
dialog was changed in a similar manner - its font style setting is replaced
with two settings, bold and italic.
Scanning Time Property. You'll find a new item in the Recognition Properties
dialog. It is the first control, and, like everything else there, its a read
only text box. It is labeled "Scan Time", and its mnemonic is ALT+N. It
contains the time, in seconds, that elapsed between the press of the scan
button and the indication to K1000 that the scan was complete. Depending on the
scanner, this may or may not include the time it took for the scan bar to
return to its home position.
Creating a List of Misspelled Words. If you are scanning something that
contains a large number of unusual words, they are likely to show up in the
ranked spelling dialog as misspellings. If you have access to an expert in the
subject of the document, that person might be able to help you determine which
words are misspellings, and which ones aren't. You can now use Control+C in the
misspellings list to copy the list to the clipboard. After that, you'll be able
to copy it to a new document that can be sent to the obliging expert.
Read Number Setting effects the Message Voice. The Read Number setting, which
lets you choose between whole numbers and digits, now effects the message voice
as well as the reading voice.
Select Audio Device. We have had a number of examples where people have lost
the ability to use SAPI 4 voices within Kurzweil 1000, because the Audio Device
ID has been changed for the speech engine. You can now use the SapiReg
diagnostic to correct that problem.
That's about it.
Stephen
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