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Kurzweil Education © All Rights Reserved.
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A Cambium Learning® Group Brand
June 7, 2012
The fifth update for Kurzweil 1000 for Windows Version 12 is now available. You may either download the executable file (https://www.kurzweiledu.com/downloads/pub/kurzweil1000/cpatches/BookshareFixMay2012.exe), or use the Online>Update feature of the software.
This is a component patch to fix the Bookshare API (which was upgraded recently). This will restore the ability to download content from Bookshare.
March 21, 2011
The fourth update for Kurzweil 1000 for Windows Version 12 is now available. You may either download the executable file (https://www.kurzweiledu.com/downloads/pub/kurzweil1000/version120/patches/k1000patch1204.exe), or use the Online>Update feature of the software.
Update 12.04 is also available on a DVD, on which you will find the Neospeech Voicetext voices and Kurzweil 1000 Documentation Folder. Note that the documentation has not been updated for version 12 updates.
Notable changes included in Update 12.04 are:
December 22, 2010
This is the third update for version 12 of the Kurzweil 1000. It should only be run on a system that contains Kurzweil 1000, version 12, version 12.01, or version 12.02. Administrative privileges will be required, and Kurzweil 1000 should not be running when this update is run. Typically, the update is downloaded from within Kurzweil 1000,and automatically run when one exits from the product.
As an alternative, it can be downloaded from our web site, https://www.kurzweiledu.com/downloads/pub/kurzweil1000/version120/patchesk1000patch1203.exe.
This update is cumulative, in that it includes all changes introduced in updates 12.01 and 12.02, as well as some new ones.
Changes introduced by Update 12.03
(1) Support for ABiSee Imaging Devices.
ABiSee Incorporated manufactures and sells Zoom-Ex, Zoom-Twix, and Eye-Pal. Each of these devices uses an electronic camera to take an image of a page. With the active assistance of ABiSee Incorporated, Kurzweil 1000 can now acquire images from those devices. If you have any of the specified devices on your system, and if you have successfully installed the software from ABiSee that accompanies those devices, you will find that a scanner source named "ABiSee Imaging Device" is listed among your other scanner sources in the Scanner Settings dialog. If you select it, you will be able to acquire and recognize pages using that device within Kurzweil 1000. Scanner Margins, Resolution, and Brightness are not available when an ABiSee Imaging Device is selected. You'll find that Scan Repeatedly works, and that, like ABiSee's own products, an image will be taken only when no motion is detected by the camera. See http://www.abisee.com for information about ABiSee and its products.
(2) Scanner Settings Dialog Changes.
If a scanner has not already been initialized, certain fields in this dialog were disabled. If you tabbed down to those fields, the scanner was initialized automatically and those fields were then enabled. This confused people who could see the screen, so all of those fields are now enabled, but the options that they contain depend upon which scanner source is selected, and whether or not that scanner has been initialized. If the scanner source is altered, or if you choose to modify a field that requires the scanner to be initialized, it will be automatically initialized and the available options refreshed.
(3) Language Identification.
If you choose to identify the language once per page, that identification was done only when a page was turned by reading continuously, or when you chose to go to a particular page. Now it is also done whenever you choose to start reading at the top of a page.
(4) Audio File Creation for Selected Text.
If you selected some text, and then chose to create audio files, a crash could occur. Now you are appropriately given the opportunity to create the audio file with just the selection, with a range of pages, or with the entire file.
(5) Opening a read-only file.
Opening a text or RTF file that was read-only, or that was in a read-only directory (such as on a CD), did not work. This has been fixed.
(6) Online Book or Magazine Search.
Sometimes it was difficult to select items for download from the search dialogs, as they could react to the pressing of an enter key done before the dialog was actually displayed. This has been fixed.
(7) Vertical Scroll.
Kurzweil 1000 scrolls text as it is being read. Scrolling was occuring more frequently than one might like, sometimes making it difficult to follow the words as they were spoken. This has been fixed.
(8) Errors during Shut Down.
Shutting down, particularly when multiple files were open, would sometimes resulted in error messages. At least some causes of these have been fixed.
(9) Polish and Arabic speech.
Support for the Polish language as well as the Arabic alphabet was added for SAPI 5 speech engines. Please note that we do not have speech engines for Arabic in-house, so testing of this has been limited.
(10) Accessing folders within ZIP files.
It was sometimes difficult to access files that were within folders within a ZIP file. This issue was exposed when attempting to open a particular Gutenberg file. This has been fixed.
(11) Audio Spooler Monitor Dialog.
A number of minor fixes were made to this dialog, which did not report things properly when using DAISY files or playing lists.
(12) Two-Page Mode for Color Images.
Two-page mode when used for color images was not working properly. This has been fixed.
(13) Dictionary Dialog.
A crash bug in the dictionary dialog has been fixed.
(14) Scanner Margins.
Changing anything in a settings dialog would disable scanner margins. This has been fixed.
(15) CD Burning.
The menu functions "Starting a Burn", "Remove Files", and "Erase CD" were broken. They have been fixed.
(16) Gutenberg Book Search.
Changes were made to the web site that supports Gutenberg's online repository. This release contains changes to allow for continued access to that site through our online books search mechanism. Note that this particular change was also available in the update titled GutenFix061510.
(17) Find and Open.
If you used Escape to cancel from the Find and Open dialog, a new blank document would open. This has been fixed.
(18) Cutting and Pasting a Page.
If you cut a page from a document that did not contain images, and then pasted it back, you would find that the pasted page contained an image. If you then tried to extract or view the image, you would find that it did not contain a usable image. This has been fixed.
(19) Folders within ZIP files.
ZIP files are treated as though they were folders in the Kurzweil 1000 user interface, but subfolders within them were not handled properly in version 12. They could not be readily created or deleted, and access to files within subfolders was not consistent. This has been fixed.
(20) Shifting Cursors.
If you had multiple files open, and you started speech in one, then, without stopping speech, switched to another, your cursor position in the file you just switched to might have been changed. This has been fixed.
(21) Keyboard Focus on Product Startup.
On some systems, Kurzweil 1000 would begin speaking before it had keyboard focus. If you immediately pressed a key, you would find that you were in some other application. This was due to the fact that we were building a list of available scanners in the background. Kurzweil 1000 now does that only when needed - that is, when you begin your first scan, or when you attempt to use the scanner settings dialog.
(22) File Rename.
If you attempt to rename a file and only change the case of one or more of the letters in the file name, the rename would fail. This has been fixed.
(23) Verbosity Settings.
When you moved from one event to another in this dialog, the status of the event would begin to be spoken. This was almost immediately cut off by the name of the event, but people with better ears than those attached to the heads of our engineers let us know about this. This has been fixed.
(24) Zombie Processes.
Under some circumstances, an application can close all of its windows, but still remain active. This was happening to Kurzweil 1000 if it was shut down while recognition was still in progress. When you would later try to run Kurzweil 1000 again, it would not run, as the new instance would notice that another instance was already running. We have identified at least one of the ways in which this was happening, and fixed it.
Changes introduced by Update 12.02.
(1) SCL Support.
SCL and AccuPage are techniques used to drive some really ancient Hewlett Packard scanners. Remarkably, they still work, but it required a small change on our part.
(2) Use of a Document Feeder in Scanners that support Duplex.
A different approach is needed when accessing pages from a document feeder with TWAIN when the scanner supports Duplex. That approach was broken in version 12 due to a compiler bug. We've worked around that problem.
(3) FineReader OCR.
Speckle removal was not working properly when the engine used was FineReader. That has been fixed - and it should be noted that use of this feature can significantly speed up recognition for some documents. Along the way we changed something that was done in the page orientation phase that also seems to speed up analysis significantly on documents that contain a mixture of black on white text along with white on black text.
(4) List Boxes and the Mouse.
Kurzweil 1000 uses list boxes in an unusual manner. Many setting choices are presented with a list box, but visually the box is just tall enough to show one choice. People who use mice tend to click on the scroll bar that is to the right of each of these list boxes to move from one item to the next. Previous releases always selected the currently visible item in response to this, but that was harder to do under .net. To simplify the lives of our technical support staff when responding to a mouse-using customer, we've added that feature back - use of a mouse on a list box will now behave in a manner that is less confusing to those of us who can see the screen.
(5) Cleaning Up after ScanSoft OCR.
We were failing to release control of each image file after it was recognized by ScanSoft OCR, which made it impossible to delete those files. The most obvious effect was that batch recognition was failing to delete the image files after recognition. This has been fixed.
(6) Opening long lists of image files.
If you attempted to open long lists of image files within the Kurzweil 1000 File Open dialog by selecting them all (and by all, I mean more several hundred), a numeric overflow exception would occur. This has been fixed.
(7) Web Service Change in Translations.
Our translation facility relies on a web service, which changed slightly. As a consequence, we needed to make a change as well to keep the online translations feature working.
Changes introduced by Update 12.01.
(1) Crash in Tree View of File Open Dialog.
If you changed focus to the list of folders in the Kurzweil 1000 File Open Dialog, then used left arrow to focus on a Drive letter, and pressed the End key, the product would freeze. This has been fixed.
(2) Exiting from K1000 with Open Documents.
Open documents were not always properly closed if you exited from Kurzweil 1000 without first closing them. Note that no actual problems have been detected in the files associated with those open documents, but it seems better to close them properly.
(3) Wrong Item selected when level changed in Bookmarks dialog.
You can change the level of a bookmark by selecting the bookmark in the tree view of bookmarks, and then pressing Shift+Left or Right arrow. Unfortunately, you could then find yourself positioned at some other bookmark in the tree view. This was inconvenient and unexpected, and has been fixed.
(4) Unable to load bookmark list twice.
If you are in the Kurzweil 1000 file open dialog and have selected a file that has bookmarks, pressing right arrow will bring up a list of those bookmarks. Pressing left arrow will close that list. If you then pressed right arrow again, you would be erroneously told that the file had no bookmarks. This has been fixed.
(5) Shifting annotations.
We found an example of a page in a KES file where a space would be added before the first word of one line of the page each time the page was rewritten. Since the page also had notes anchored to words that followed that space, the notes would sometimes move to a different word on the page. This rather subtle bug has been found and fixed.
(6) Currency Recognition Dialog not speaking button name properly.
If you entered the currency recognition dialog, waited until it finished scanning and announced a result, and then pressed tab, the control that you focused on would not speak. This has been fixed.
(7) Incorrect item in Sort list of the Poorly Recognized Pages Dialog.
The list that specifies the sort order for items in the poorly recognized pages dialog had an incorrect message for one of its options. This has been fixed.
(8) Incorrect items in Page Orientation List of the Settings Dialog.
The list of options for page orientation in the scanner settings dialog listed one of those options twice. This was somewhat confusing, but worse, it effected the meaning of the selected item if you chose an item at or beyond the repeated item. This has been fixed.
(9) Telephone Registration Dialog using Emphasis Voice.
The first message in the telephone registration dialog was being spoken with the emphasis voice. It now uses the reading voice.
(10) New User Wizard Topics should be Read Only.
Topics presented using the New User Wizard are not modifiable. As it turned out, though, the control used allowed changes. The changes could not be saved, but they shouldn't have been allowed at all.
(11) Mark Description does not vocalize new line characters.
The dialog used for bookmarks, hyperlinks, and notes allows you to edit the description of those objects, and that description can contain multiple lines. Unfortunately, when you typed the new line character was not vocalized. It is now. Note that this also effects the form fillout dialog.
(12) Command Line Open fails if Autoload Enabled.
You can typically open a KES file by selecting it in Windows Explorer, and then pressing enter. Unfortunately, this was not working properly if you ran Kurzweil 1000 with AutoLoad enabled, and if you had one or more files that would be automatically loaded. This has been fixed.
(13) Use conditional message when trying quick access to Bookmarks for a PDF file
If you pressed right arrow to access the bookmark list in a selected file, and if that file was a PDF file, you were likely to be told that the file had no bookmarks. Instead, you are now told that the file may or may not have bookmarks, but that they cannot be easily accessed. Kurzweil 1000 often can access those bookmarks once the file has been opened and recognized.
(14) Spelling Errors in On-line help.
A number of spelling errors have been fixed in the context sensitive help messages.
(15) Registration and Time Zone Changes.
Changing the Time Zone on your computer could cause Kurzweil 1000 to forget that your product was registered. This has been fixed.
(16) Obtrusive message in the Bookmarks Dialog. If you removed all of the bookmarks from the tree view in the bookmarks dialog, it would announce that there were no more bookmarks in the current file. This message should be silenced if you tab to another control, but it continued nonetheless. This has been fixed. This also applies to the hyperlink and notes dialog.
(17) Context Menu Item in Windows Explorer.
If you select a KES file in Windows Explorer and bring up the context menu, the default item was named "Kurzweil 1000 File". It will now have a more standard name describing its action - "Open with Kurzweil 1000".
(18) Translation Dialog Issue.
If you tabbed through the Translation dialog without first specifying text that should be translated, the destination text box would not speak when you tabbed to it. This has been fixed.
(19) Read Only Text Boxes and Control+L.
Read only text boxes did not respond to Control+L, which should spell the current word. This has been fixed.
(20) Batch Scanning Prefix doesn't respond to Escape or Enter keystrokes.
Escape should always cancel, and Enter should usually accept, a form. Those keystrokes didn't work if the current control was the Batch Scanning Prefix text box in the Scanner Settings Dialog. This has been fixed.
(21) File Property Dialog misbehaves in some circumstances.
If you opened the file property dialog for a KES file using Alt+Enter from the file open dialog multiple times, it would behave oddly, providing messages that were appropriate only for an open file. This has been fixed.
(22) KOCRUtil fails to run.
Several files that KOCRUtil depends upon were not installed. This update supplies them.
(23) Recently Opened Submenu.
The recently opened submenu under the File menu was sometimes unpopulated. This mainly occurred if your first action after starting Kurzweil 1000 was to create a new file. This has been fixed.
(24) Case changes were ignored in the Edit Corrections dialog.
If you made a change to the case sensitivity property for a correction in the Edit Corrections dialog, the change was ignored. This has been fixed.
(25) Using a dialog box while scanning.
If Kurzweil 1000 is being kept in the foreground while scanning is in progress (this is an option in the scanner configuration diagnostic, and it is usually enabled), and if you opened a dialog box while scanning was in progress, focus would be shifted back to the main product window, making it impossible to use the dialog. This has been fixed.
(26) New Pronunciations.
If the word to be pronounced and its replacement are identical in the New Pronunciations dialog when you press enter, no pronunciation is made. In the past, you would not have heard an error message, now you will, and you will still be in that dialog.
(27) Launch Menu.
If you had a file open, the applications normally listed in the launch menu were suppressed. This is fixed.
(28) Overwriting an Audio File.
If you created audio files starting with the same document name and going to the same output folder three times, the third time would overwrite the files created the second time. This has been fixed.
(29) Using SAPI-5 voices for languages that use different alphabets.
Kurzweil 1000 did not speak languages such as Russian, Turkish, or Greek properly if the selected voice used the SAPI-5 standard. This has been fixed.
(30) Scanner Margins Dialog.
Although it took some doing, it was possible to crash Kurzweil 1000 by entering large numbers into the numeric fields of the scanner margins dialog. This has been fixed. It was also noted that the message when an overly large scanner margin was rejected was not spoken properly. That too has been fixed.
(31) Enabling Active Speech from a Settings File.
If active speech is disabled in the configuration settings dialog, and, in the same session, a settings file is loaded that enables active speech, speech will remain disabled. This has been fixed.
(32) Audio Playlists.
The code which actually creates iTunes and Media Player playlists, and adds completed MP3 files to those playlists was inadvertantly left out of the release. It's back.
(33) Registration Problem.
If you attempt to register as a new user, some of the fields that you need to use where left disabled. This has been fixed.
(34) Changing your Document Home.
Changing the Document Home did not work properly. This has been fixed.
Kurzweil Education © All Rights Reserved.
A Cambium Learning® Group Brand