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Kurzweil 1000 Version 9 -
Patches and Updates
Please click on the below link to view and download a patch:
Kurzweil 1000 Version 9.04 (3.09 MB)
Download Kurzweil 1000 Patch 9.04 (3.09MB)
Patch to access Encyclopedia Britannica (128KB)
Changes introduced by Patch 9.04 into Kurzweil 1000:
July 27, 2006
Announcing Patch 9.04 for Version 9 of Kurzweil 1000. This patch can be installed on systems that have version 9.0, 9.01, 9.02, or 9.03. This patch is cumulative, and contains everything that was in 9.01, 9.02 and 9.03. There is no need to download and install previous version 9 patches.
We have updated components that are used by various online services -particularly searching through web repositories for Books or Magazines, and access to various Encyclopedias.
You can use the Online->Update menu item in Kurzweil 1000 to download and install this patch. If that proves difficult - usually because of firewall difficulties, you can manually download the file.
Changes introduced by Patch 9.03 into Kurzweil 1000:
June 30, 2005
Patch 9.03 is for Kurzweil 1000 Version 9, 9.01, or 9.02. This patch is cumulative, and contains everything that was in 9.01 and 9.02, plus a few new things noted below.
- A fix for Wikipedia
The Wikipedia web site changed a few days ago, breaking our access to this popular encyclopedia. This patch was written primarily to provide that feature again.
- A fix for Online BookShelves
The Online BookShelves feature stopped working for BookShare.org, because the number of entries exceeded the capacity of the list that displayed them there. This has been fixed.
- Improvements in Currency Recognition
The templates for currency recognition have been updated for all four supported currencies.
Changes introduced by Patch 9.02 into Kurzweil 1000:
December 16, 2004
This is the second patch for version 9 of Kurzweil 1000. It is a cumulative patch, so it can be applied to systems that have version 9, or version 9.01. Changes that are relevant to version 9.01 are towards the bottom of this Web page. This 9.02 update contains all the enhancements of version 9.01.
Enhancements
- Recognition of Currency from a few more Countries
In addition to U.S. Currency, Kurzweil 1000 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.
- 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 Kurzweil 1000 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Support for DECTalk USB
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.
- 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.
- Updated Online Manual
The Online manual has been updated to document a number of previously undocumented features in 9.0.
Program Fixes
- 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.
- Utility Dialogs
Certain dialog boxes did not silence one message when you tabbed from one control to another. They do now.
- DAISY Export
Several changes have been made to improve our ability to save DAISY documents.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- DAISY Support
A variety of improvements have been made to both reading and writing of DAISY documents.
- Settings and Reading Status Messages
The messages reporting Reading and Settings Status have been changed to better report features such as color scanning.
- Sentence and Word Navigation
A few problems involving both word and sentence navigation at the beginnings or ends of pages have been fixed.
- 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.
- 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, the program could terminate. That dialog is now automatically closed when the new article is opened.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Scanner Support
A change was made to fix grayscale and dynamic thresholding for the Plustek OpticBook 3600, and also for the Canon 9080.
- 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.
- 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.
- Kurzweil 3000 File Compatibility
Attempts to use the Show Image menu item after opening a color Kurzweil 3000 document could cause the program to fail. This has been fixed, although Kurzweil 1000 cannot read with highlighting in a Kurzweil 3000 image unless you rerecognize the image.
- Strange RTF data
Some customers have complained about finding lots of blank pages in RTF files that they produced with Kurzweil 1000. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Right Indentation.
Right paper margin markups in RTF and KES files were sometimes inappropriately affecting the right paragraph indent. This has been fixed.
- 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.
- Version Numbers
Version 9.0 of 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.
Kurzweil 1000 Patch 9.01 covers the following:
August 26th, 2004
- 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.
- IBM ViaVoice
We have found a number of character combinations which, if spoken, will cause IBM ViaVoice (now known as IBM TTS) to fail. We have worked around all of those known combinations.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Currency Recognition - the new $20 bill
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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