Kurzweil 1000 Version 10

Announcing Version 10.05 (3.11 MB)

Version 10.05

Download Kurzweil 1000 Update 10.05 (3.11 MB)

Changes introduced by Update 10.05 into Kurzweil 1000.

June 12th, 2006

This is the fifth update for version 10 of the Kurzweil 1000. It should only be installed on a system that contains version 10, version 10.01, version 10.02, version 10.03, or version 10.04. Administrative privileges will be required, and Kurzweil 1000 should not be running when this update is run.

It includes all of the changes made by updates 10.01, 10.02, 10.03, and 10.04 as well as the following new changes.

Fixes in Update 10.05

Speaking Words that end with an asterisk
When a word ends with a single asterisk, it often indicates that a footnote is available for that word. Unfortunately, several text to speech engines spell the word when they are asked to speak it. Consequently, we now insert a space between the word and the trailing asterisk as it is spoken.
Support for More Scanners
The Kurzweil 1000 supports a number of different standards for interfacing to scanners. Unfortunately, the manufacturers of those scanners often implement their support in idiosyncratic ways, forcing us to make modifications in order to support them. We have added such modifications recently for the HP Scanjet 4800, 7800, 8270, and 8300 scanners, and the Visioneer 9420.
Bookshare.org and Online Magazines
Bookshare.org modified the way in which access is provided to magazines and newspapers. That requires us, in turn, to modify our approach to accessing their repository.
NLS Web Braille and Online Books and Magazines
NLS Web Braille modified the way in which access was provided for all of the materials in their repository. We have adapted our code to support their changes. Note that we will now require you to accept their agreement each time you choose to download a book or magazine from their site.
JAWS and Ranked Spelling
We were able to duplicate a customer's report involving JAWS, Windows ME, and Ranked Spelling. If JAWS 7 was active but silent, display of the list of misspellings in the ranked spelling dialog would sometimes cause speech to stop working in Kurzweil 1000. This problem seems to be related to the speed of the computer, and possibly only occurs on slower computers. We have worked around the issue.
Improved Recognition of US Currency
Recognition of recent versions of US currency has been improved.

Changes introduced by Update 10.04 into Kurzweil 1000:

April 18, 2006

This is the fourth update for version 10 of Kurzweil 1000. It should only be installed on a system that contains Version 10, Version 10.01, Version 10.02, or Version 10.03. Administrative privileges will be required, and Kurzweil 1000 should not be running when this update is run.

It includes all of the changes made by updates 10.01, 10.02, and 10.03 as well as the following new changes.

Fixes in Update 10.04

Punctuation Level and Paragraph Pauses
If the Punctuation Level is set to "All", the paragraph pause setting will be ignored. A paragraph pause is introduced with a punctuation mark, which would be spoken erroneously when the punctuation level is All.
Help Messages
The help message spoken when one pressed F1 in the Show Images dialog had a minor mistake. It has been corrected.
Suspicious Regions and Tables
When FineReader was used as the recognition engine, ignoring suspicious regions could erroneously remove cells from tables. This has been improved, though it can still occur. It is safest to keep suspicious regions if you are expecting material to contain tables.
Downloading from Gutenberg or Bookshare.org
If a document in the Gutenberg or Bookshare.org repositories had a very long name, or if that name contained characters that cannot be a part of a file name, the download would succeed, but no file would be retained. This has been fixed.
Saving as HTML
When a document is saved as HTML, hyperlinks were not preserved when multiple links pointed to the same destination in a document, or when a source of a link or a bookmark was at the same position as a target of another link. These problems have been fixed.
File Copy
When you copy a file, the copy should have the same value for the read only attribute as the original file. That wasn't the case, but is now.
End of Line Hyphens and ScanSoft
If ScanSoft were used as the OCR engine, end of line hyphens can sometimes be identified as "soft" or "optional" hyphens. These were suppressed appropriately in Kurzweil 1000, but would cause the two parts of the word to be separated by a space if they were saved in an RTF file. This has been fixed.
Alphanumeric Words
Words which contain alphabetic characters but end in numbers are now altered slightly before they are spoken, such that the numeric suffix is separated from the last alphabetic character by a space. Some speech engines, when asked to speak a word containing both letters and numbers, will spell the entire word. This was particularly problematic for subscripts and superscripts.
Better DAISY 2
When Kurzweil 1000 created audio DAISY files, it would occasionally cause problems with empty audio clips and with SMIL labels. These problems have been resolved.
Virtual Printer Security Issue
Depending on how your KESI Virtual Printer is configured, Kurzweil 1000 could come up having System Administrator priviledges even if the current user did not have them. The router will now post an error message in this circumstance, and will not run until the printer has been properly configured.
Scanner Support
Some changes have been made to support new models of Fujitsu scanners, and to improve the cancellation of a scan for Plustek OpticBook scanners.
The editor and screen readers
The edit control used in Kurzweil 1000 did not issue WM_GETTEXT messages for very large blocks of text. Depending on the technique used by a screen reader, this could make the text in the edit control unavailable to a screen reader when a page was very big. This has been fixed.
VoiceWare and accented characters
The VoiceWare (also known as NeoSpeech) voices had trouble with accented characters. we have now worked around that problem.
Faster Recognition with multi-page image files
We found some inefficiencies in the way we were processing multipage image files (including PDFs), especially when we were using FineReader.
Repair to breakage in Online Magazines for Bookshare.org
Access to online newspapers and magazines through Bookshare.org broke due to a change in their web site. It has been fixed.
Echoing by Word (and then some)
If typing was echoed by word, and you were typing in the middle of a line, pressing a space would cause the previous word, plus the first character of the next word, to be echoed. Thanks to Paul and Jerry Guarniero for reporting this problem. It has been fixed.
Mixed Case Words
Kurzweil 1000 automatically separates words with multiple capital letters when speaking them, which generally improves the pronunciation of compound words like NetScape. Unfortunately, it causes problems with scottish names such as McDonald. We now do not separate after capital "M" followed by lower case "c".
New Money
Support has been added for the latest version of the ten dollar bill for U.S. currency recognition.
Issues involving Decimal Points
There was an issue when typing more than one decimal point into a text box that was expecting a number that might include a decimal point. Examples include the margin settings in the scanner margin dialog. This has been fixed.
Errant punctuation issues
It is hard to say how often this occurred, but it was possible that an attempt to read or correct documents that contained long sequences of punctuation characters would cause Kurzweil 1000 to terminate. The frequency of this happening would depend not only on the text of the document, but also on the contents of correction files and pronunciation files. It has been fixed.
Empty Tree Views and Verbosity
Problems would occur when moving into an empty tree view, if tree view position was being reported as a result of a verbosity setting change. This has been fixed.

Fixes in Update 10.03

Opening DAISY documents while a screen reader is active
Opening a DAISY document while running a screen reader was dramatically slower than opening the same document without a screen reader. Its better now - though still slightly slower.
File System Speed Improvement
Update 10.02 introduced a problem that effected Kurzweil 1000 performance on some systems. In particular, when a change was made to a page and was then committed to the file system (typically by moving to another page), it took a while - sometimes a few seconds for particularly large files. The problem was found, fixed, and then the speed was improved upon, so that action is now somewhat faster than it was even before version 10.02.
Institutional Accounts for Bookshare.org
A primary contact for an organization can have an individual subscription to Bookshare.org, which will have the same account name as their institutional subscription. That particular situation caused problems with our login to BookShare.org. Its been fixed.
Recently Opened Files and Bookshare
When Bookshare.org DAISY documents (whose extensions are ".bks") were opened, they were not added to the list of recently opened files. That's been fixed.
Close Single Quotes and Spell Checking
Some documents use two close single quotes (Decimal 146) instead of a double close quote. This was causing problems with spell checking and ranked spelling, in that properly spelled words followed by two close single quotes were treated as though they were misspelled. That's been fixed.

Enhancements in Update 10.02

HumanWare Maestro Support
You can now send files to your Maestro using the File->Send To feature in Kurzweil 1000. Active Synch is used, so you should dock the Maestro first and verify that a connection is active. Then use File->Send To, select the files you wish to send, select "Maestro" as the device, and access the properties menu. Set the Path appropriately in the first control of that dialog. Then tab to the file formats list, and choose among the available formats: Text, MS Word, RTF, and DAISY. Press enter, and then enter again to begin transmitting files to your Maestro. Note that the DAISY choice is for DAISY 3 documents. If you would like to send an Audio DAISY file, you should copy the files that make up that file yourself outside of this mechanism, as Active Synch is rather slow.
Diagnostic Improvement
We have added a new button to the diagnostic SapiReg.exe. It is labeled "Copy to Clipboard". It will copy the list of Speech engines found by SapiReg to the clipboard, so that you can paste that list into an open text document. The main use of this, we expect, will be to send us that list in an email.

Fixes in Update 10.02

SSIL Support
Certain control sequences were being spoken when an SSIL device was used for speech.
Wikipedia Articles
A change was made to ignore some HTML that was present in most, of not all Wikipedia articles. This suppresses some text in the header that said "Jump to: navigation, search".
Volume Control
Control of reading voice volume was broken in the Voice Settings dialog.
Audio Spooler
We found and fixed a situation where the Audio Spooler would not finish creating an MP3 file.
Showing Images in a KES file created by Kurzweil 3000
Words were not highlighted properly in Kurzweil 1000 when reading was done in an image, if that image was created by Kurzweil 3000
Merge and Open
If you selected a long list of documents to be merged, and then arrowed through that list in an attempt to reorder the documents, you would have found that pressing down arrow would sometimes jump unexpectedly to a file near the top of the list.
ThumbNails
Some TIFF files contain separate "pages" which are "thumbnails" - very small representations of an image that is available elsewhere in the same file. These sometimes conflicted with Kurzweil 1000.
Overwriting an existing KES file
If you save a KES file in a way which will overwrite the existing file, a check is made to be sure that we can read the new KES file first. If we cannot, the following error message is posted, and the save is not permitted. The message is:
"Sorry, there seems to be a problem with the open file. You might want to try saving it to a new file, and later attempting to open it. Or, perhaps you should use copy and paste to save your changes elsewhere. We would rather not overwrite your existing file, as there is a significant possibility that you would not be able to open it again."
FineReader
We have identified an issue that occurs when FineReader recognizes certain difficult documents. It has been fixed.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Access to Encyclopedia Britannica through the Online Encyclopedias menu item broke in early November due to a significant change in the provider's web site. This update adapts to that change, once more providing access.
Speed and Volume for ViaVoice TTS and Eloquence
We were constantly reasserting the speed and volume parameters for voices from the ViaVoice or Eloquence engines. Oddly, though, that caused the voices to sound somewhat different. We now do this only when we need to - typically after a change is made for emphasis.
Inverting Black and White for FAXes.
When a scanned image was sent with the KFax application, white areas were shown as black, and black as white. This has been fixed.

Enhancements in Update 10.01

A New Online Reference
You can now look up entries in Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary. This is available through the "Use an Encyclopedia" menu item under the Online menu.

Fixes in Update 10.01 - The following problems have been addressed in this release

Updating a file in a ZIP folder
If you opened a KES or DAISY file in a ZIP folder, it would not be updated when you later saved or closed the file.
UNC Paths
UNC Paths, if entered through the traditional K1000 file dialogs, were treated as though they were improperly formatted, resulting in an error message.
End of Paragraph Pauses in Audio Files
When audio files were created, no pauses were introduced at the ends of paragraphs that did not end with sentence punctuation, even if the setting that controls this was enabled.
Opening RTF or HTML files with large pictures
Kurzweil 1000 often failed to open RTF or HTML documents if they contained large pictures.
Two Page Mode and Blank Pages
When recognizing two pages at once, if one page was blank it was frequently ignored - that is, a blank page was not created in the document, even if blank pages were to be kept.
Support For SAPI 4 RealSpeak Voices
Kurzweil 1000 version 10 tried to drive SAPI 4 RealSpeak voices at a higher frequency than they could support, resulting in voices in a high pitch.
ScanSoft and PDF Files
Some PDF files that cannot be directly opened by ScanSoft's OCR Engines can be recognized through the Virtual Printer, but Kurzweil 1000 was not automatically noting the open failure and redirecting the file through the Virtual Printer.
Display of Text Messages
Short spoken messages should be displayed in a text box near the bottom of the Kurzweil 1000 window. They weren't.
Speaking of Punctuation
When the punctuation level was set to None, certain common clusters of punctuation characters would nonetheless be spoken. One example is when a sentence ended with a word, then a closing parenthesis, and then a period. With IBM TTS, the period would be spoken.
Sending a KES file to a Book Port or Book Courier
Attempts to transfer KES files to either a Book Port or Book Courier through the File->Send To mechanism were failing.
Sending a File to a Device
Use of File->Send To would often leave files in the temporary folder, causing the Kurzweil 1000 to erroneously suggest that files needed to be restored the next time the product was run.
Audio File Names
When audio files are created as a part of a DAISY document, their file names are simply a numeric sequence. This is correct, but we didn't mean to also use only a numeric sequence for standard MP3 or Wave audio files. We've gone back to the convention of appending a sequence number to a name that is based on the original document name.
Correction Files and Exclamation Points
The standard correction file that ships with K1000 will convert a stand-alone exclamation point to a capital "I". While that is a reasonable correction, the definition of "stand-alone" was problematic. If a word ending with an exclamation point were corrected, the exclamation point itself would also be corrected. This affected the replace function in Ranked Spelling as well as the corrections facility.