[bksvol-discuss] Announcing Version 9.02 of Kurzweil 1000
- From: Stephen Baum <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 11:05:02 -0500
The following was posted yesterday on the K1000 list. Since a number of you
use the K1000, and since some of the bug fixes listed below are in response
to messages posted here, I thought I'd post it. Advance warning - this is a
long message.
If you are currently using version 9.0 or 9.01, you should now be able to
download and install version 9.02. Note that this replaces 9.01 - if you
are starting with version 9.0, you do not need to install 9.01.
To install, use the Update menu item in the Online menu. This should return
with an indication that patch 9.02 is available. Select that item (its in a
check box list, and is probably the only item in the list). Then press
enter. A download will begin. You can then continue to use the Kurzweil
1000. When the download is complete, you will be told that you can install
by exiting from the Kurzweil 1000. Exit when you are ready, and version
9.02 will install. Give it a minute or so before starting the K1000 again.
When you rerun the Kurzweil 1000, you can use the About menu item to check
the version number.
If you find that the Online Update mechanism does not work for you (usually
because you are behind a firewall), you can download the patch from
ftp://ftp.kurzweiledu.com/pub/kurzweil1000/version90/patches/
The appropriate file in that FTP folder is called k1000patch902.exe.
Download it, and then run it, making sure you are on a system that contains
version 9.0 or 9.01 of the Kurzweil 1000. A dialog box will briefly pop up,
but you do not need to respond to it - the patch will occur automatically.
You can also download the patch directly from our web site if you prefer.
The direct URL is http://kurzweiledu.com/downloads_k1000_updates_ver9.asp
Once the installation is complete (using either approach), release notes
can be found in your general folder in a file called Patch902.txt. Its
rather voluminous contents follow.
Changes introduced by Patch 9.02 into the Kurzweil 1000.
December 16th, 2004.
This is the second patch for version 9.0 of the Kurzweil 1000. It is a
cumulative patch, so it can be applied to systems that have version 9.0, or
version 9.01. Changes that are relevant to version 9.01 are towards the
bottom of this file.
Enhancements.
(1) Recognition of Currency from a few more Countries.
In addition to U.S. Currency, the K1000 can now recognize the denomination
of Euros, British Pounds, and Canadian dollars. The choice of which type of
currency to recognize is controlled by a list box in the Recognize Currency
dialog. Tab past the "Scan Again" button to get to this dialog. Note that
an attempt is made to scan and recognize a bill immediately when you enter
this dialog, using whatever is the currently selected currency type.
Currency choices are: British, Canadian, European, and United States. After
you have changed this setting, press shift plus tab to return to the Scan
Again button, and press enter to scan and recognize the bill. Note that you
can later save your change in a settings file.
Please note that you can only scan British, Canadian, or European currency
with a color scanner. Please also note that you now must place the bill
against the origin point of the scanner (i.e., along the edge that the
scanner bar will first see, and on the left side from the point of view of
the image). The long edge of the currency should be parallel to the scanner
bar, and should abut the edge.
(2) Support for more Online References.
The list of Encyclopedias that are available from the Online menu now
includes Encyclopaedia Britannica Concise, Encyclopaedia Britannica ($),
Encyclopaedia Britannica Student ($), and Bartlett's, Columbia, Simpson's,
and Respectfully Quoted Quotations. In addition, we have added localized
versions of Wikipedia. The Wikipedia option has been replaced with three
options: Wikipedia (English), Wikipedia (Francais), and Wikipedia (Espanol)
Those references followed by a dollar sign will require a subscription, and
the K1000 will ask for your user name and password if you try to use them.
Note that you can save both the user name and the password in a settings file.
(3) Opening Multiple Encyclopedia Articles.
If more than one article matches your keywords when you use an
encyclopedia, you can now select multiple articles from the list. Each will
be downloaded and opened as a separate document.
(4) A Modest Speedup in the Recognition Settings Dialog.
If you had not used an OCR engine yet in the current session, it could take
quite a while for the recognition settings dialog to load. That is no
longer true, although a pause will still be noticed once you tab down to
the list of available languages, as the current OCR engine needs to be
initialized in order to create that list.
(5) Suspending Recognition.
Particularly when you open multi-page image or PDF documents, it is
possible for recognition to be many pages behind. If you discover that you
aren't really interested in the document being opened, it could be
difficult to close it. In such a circumstance, pressing Escape will now
suspend recognition after a page is completed. You can later resume
recognition by pressing F9. In addition, if you close the document that was
being recognized, the queue of images to be recognized for that page is
emptied. If recognition is suspended, you cannot insert a scan, rerecognize
a page, rerecognize all, or rescan until you have either closed the
document, or resumed its recognition.
(6) Support for DECTalk USB.
The Kurzweil 1000 now supports Access Solutions DECTalk USB product for
text to speech. If you have this device connected to your system, it will
show up in the list of available speech engines in the Voice Settings
dialog automatically. Note that you need current (after 11/19/2004)
firmware updates from Access Solutions for this to work properly.
(7) Ranked Spelling and the Edit Button.
If you return to the ranked spelling dialog after use of the Edit button in
that dialog, the currently selected misspelling will be the same one you
were at when you pressed edit, or the one that would have immediately
followed it, if all of its occurrences have been repaired. This is an
improvement from the previous approach, where you were always positioned at
the first misspelling in the list.
(8) Updated Online Manual.
The Online manual has been updated to document a number of previously
undocumented features in 9.0.
Bug Fixes.
(1) Opening an RTF file.
A customer provided an example of an RTF file which would hang Kurzweil
1000 when an attempt was made to open it. That problem has been fixed.
(2) Utility Dialogs.
Certain dialog boxes did not silence one message when you tabbed from one
control to another. They do now.
(3) Daisy Export.
Several changes have been made to improve our ability to save Daisy documents.
(4) The Project Gutenberg Site.
Project Gutenberg altered its database format, so we had to adjust our
software to accommodate that change. It will be slower when it is
downloading the latest database: the file is about 800 kilobytes
compressed. The good news is that we are finding a few thousand more books
on that site.
(5) Bookmarks, chimes, and level numbers.
If you enabled a chime in a bookmark, and if that bookmark had a level
number other than one, the chime would not be preserved if you saved and
reopened the document. This has been fixed.
(6) Reading Status Report.
If the scanning mode is image only, the reading status report indicated
that one fewer images had been scanned than was the case.
(7) Chimes while speaking continuously.
Chiming normally occurs immediately before the word marked with a chime
should be spoken. However, if that word was preceded by more than one
space, or if that word was the first word in a paragraph, the chime tended
to follow the word rather than precede it. We've fixed this.
(8) Moving by Word.
Control+Right Arrow would ignore a blank line at the bottom of a page.
Control+Left Arrow would ignore a blank line at the top of a page. Both
will now trigger the appropriate verbosity event in these circumstances.
(9) Suggested format for a File Summary.
When you use the File Summarization feature, and then chose to save the
summary, the suggested format would be either text or RTF. It is now KES.
(10) Daisy Support.
A variety of improvements have been made to both reading and writing of
Daisy documents.
(11) Settings and Reading Status Messages.
The messages reporting Reading and Settings Status have been changed to
better report features such as color scanning.
(12) Sentence and Word Navigation.
A few problems involving both word and sentence navigation at the
beginnings or ends of pages have been fixed.
(13) Encyclopedias and Table Identification.
If Table Identification was disabled, encyclopedia articles were marked as
having been modified, causing a prompt for saving them when a close was
attempted. This has been fixed.
(14) Bookmark Dialog and Encyclopedia Links.
If an encyclopedia article opened while you were in the bookmark dialog for
another article, and you continued to use that bookmark dialog, a crash
could occur. That dialog is now automatically closed when the new article
is opened.
(15) FineReader and End of Line hyphens.
Optional hyphens at the ends of lines were removed with FineReader 7, but
sometimes a space was left, breaking the word at the position of the old
hyphen. This has been fixed.
(16) ScanSoft and Two Page Mode.
If you use one of the two ScanSoft OCR engines, and you are recognizing two
pages at a time, recognition would fail for both pages if the left page was
blank. This has been fixed.
(17) Rerecognition of Color Images.
If you scanned in color and saved the image in your document, rerecognition
of that image would fail. This has been fixed.
(18) Online Magazines and ACB.
A change to the ACB web site required a change in our Online Magazines
feature to continue our access to their magazines.
(19) End of Line hyphens.
Our code to remove end of line hyphens was sometimes affecting the space
immediately after any word that ended in a hyphen, or any standalone
hyphen. This has been corrected. We have also made this feature somewhat
less aggressive, as it was removing more hyphens than one might like.
(20) Scanner Support.
A change was made to fix grayscale and dynamic thresholding for the Plustek
OpticBook 3600, and also for the Canon 9080.
(21) Unicode Characters.
Unicode characters are now converted to ANSI. If that conversion cannot be
done for a particular character, it will be converted to a question mark.
(22) Find and Open Problem.
The Find facility would not find words that were near characters whose
ASCII value was greater than 127. This has been fixed.
(23) K3000 File Compatibility.
Attempts to use the Show Image menu item after opening a color K3000
document could result in a crash. This has been fixed, although the K1000
cannot read with highlighting in a K3000 image unless you rerecognize the
image.
(24) Strange RTF data.
Some customers have complained about finding lots of blank pages in RTF
files that they produced with the K1000. The source of the problem appears
to be the production of a character whose font size indicates that it would
be about 20 inches high. We've worked around that problem.
(25) Small Font Sizes.
If you selected text that was in a font smaller than 8 points, used the
Edit->Format->Font menu item, did not select a different font size, and
pressed enter, a run time error would occur. This has been fixed.
(26) Entering unusual characters.
You can enter unusual characters into a document by holding the ALT key,
and then typing in the appropriate numbers with the numeric keypad.
However, if the Num Lock key is not pressed, the non-numeric value of those
keystrokes also takes effect, including use of the Home, End, Page Up, Page
Down, Insert, and Del keys. That's been fixed.
(27) Ranked Spelling of one page documents.
If you made a change using the misspelling list in ranked spelling, and
then did an apply all, the statistics would not be updated if the document
contained only one page. This has been fixed.
(28) Word Echo.
If you echo what you type by word, and if you are inserting text in the
middle of a larger block of text, the echoed word would be garbled, as the
word after it would be appended to what was being spoken. This has been fixed.
(29) Announcing a Table.
If table recognition was enabled, and if the first cell of a table was
blank, the announcement indicating that a table had been reached was not
spoken. This has been fixed.
(30) Truncated Pages.
If a page was recognized as ending in an optional hyphen, some amount of
the recognized text would be dropped from the page. This has been fixed.
(31) Right Indentation.
Right paper margin markups in RTF and KES files were sometimes
inappropriately affecting the right paragraph indent. This has been fixed.
(32) Scanner Settings.
Certain Scanner Settings (Duplex Scanning, Hold Scanner, and Scanner Uses
Threshold) were not accurately reflecting their true states. Changes made
to them were, in fact, taking effect, but their initial state was not
necessarily correct.
(33) Version Numbers.
Version 9.0 of the Kurzweil 1000 shipped with ScanSoft 12.5, but the
version number reported in the recognition engines setting was 12.0. Its
been changed to reflect the actual version.
Changes introduced by Patch 9.01 into the Kurzweil 1000.
August 26th, 2004.
This is the first patch for version 9.0 of the Kurzweil 1000, and it is a
comparatively modest patch. Its release was driven by the fact that
National Library Services changed their URL, requiring us to modify our
Online Books functionality.
Bug Fixes.
(1) NLS Web Braille.
The URL and interface for NLS Web Braille has changed. This patch updates
our information for that, so that online books can once again access that
repository.
(2) IBM ViaVoice.
We have found a number of character combinations which, if spoken, will
crash IBM ViaVoice (now known as IBM TTS). We have worked around all of
those known combinations.
(3) RTF and HTML Pagination.
Badly formed RTF could cause the K1000 to insert a number of extra pages in
a document when the file was opened. This has been fixed. A similar problem
was fixed for HTML documents.
(4) Scanner Support.
The latest drivers for the HP 5590C required a small modification on our
part to enable proper use of the document feeder. A change was also made
for the Epson Perfection 4180.
(5) FineReader 7.0 and Column Identification.
Column identification could not be disabled when FineReader 7.0 was
selected as the recognition engine. This has been fixed.
(6) Currency Recognition - the new $20.
The front side of a $20 bill could not be recognized with the templates
shipped in version 9. This was a step backwards, since they were recognized
with version 8.01. The templates that made that happen have been included
in this patch.
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