Welcome to the Kurzweil 1000 Tutorial, Part 2. This text file contains Sections 8 through 16. If at any time you need assistance, you can contact Kurzweil 1000 Technical Support by email at Kurzweil1000support@kurzweiledu.com or by phone at 888-995-9905 in the U.S. or Canada, or 781-276-0600 if you are calling from elsewhere. Section 8: Finding specific information from the Online Manual One of the most comprehensive sources of information about Kurzweil 1000 is the online manual. By now you should be pretty familiar with the Alt and H keys to go to the Help menu. If the online manual is not already open, please do so now by using mnemonics. Press Alt+H, then press the letter O. And recall that you can also use the keypad by holding down the Read key then pressing the Help and Status key. Use either method now to open the manual. Kurzweil 1000 opens to the current page, that is the page on which you left off, and begins reading. Press F5 to stop reading and continue with the tape. You can, of course, start at page one and read all the way through until you reach the very last page. But usually people turn to the online manual to get specific information to help them complete a task. There are two ways to get specific information. One is to use the Find function from the Edit menu and the other is to use the bookmarks that are already set in the Manual. In the following exercise, we walk you through finding key words. Thereafter, we use bookmarks to find information. With the Online Manual open, press the Control and F keys to access the Find function. Of course, you could also press the Alt and the letter E keys to open the Edit menu, then press the Down Arrow key until you hear Kurzweil 1000 announce, “Find,” then press the Enter key, but Control plus F is worth memorizing. Kurzweil 1000 says “Find” and announces the word in which your cursor is located in the Manual. Type “fax” or any desired key words or topic. Press the Enter key. Kurzweil 1000 takes you to the next occurrence in the Manual of the key word you typed and tells you on what page and in which line the word was found. If you want to read the text, press the Start and Stop Reading key on the keypad or the F5 key on the keyboard. As always in Kurzweil 1000, there are multiple ways to perform an operation. When using the Find command, it’s worth noting that you can also use the F3 key to find the next instance of a word or Shift + F3 to find the previous occurrence. Now let’s work with the bookmarks in the Manual. In this usage, you can think of bookmarks as a Table of Contents of sorts. Once you know how to create bookmarks, which we cover in a later section, you can have this type of “browsing” in any of your documents. To go to a bookmark, press Alt plus R, and then the letter B or you can use Control plus R. Kurzweil 1000 opens the Go to Bookmark dialog box and places your cursor in a list of bookmarks. What you hear Kurzweil 1000 announce depends on the page number you were on when you chose Go to Bookmark from the menu. If you were on page one of the manual, you would have heard Kurzweil 1000 say "select a bookmark. copyright information and notices.” But if you had been on some other page of the manual, you would have heard a different bookmark. To simplify navigation of the bookmarks, you can change the order in which the bookmarks are sorted. While there’s a mnemonic for getting to the Sort item in the bookmarks dialog, for now let’s press the Tab key twice. Kurzweil 1000 reports that the bookmarks are sorted by page number and that bookmark levels are observed. This option is the default and organizes bookmarks by page number and level, very much like an outline. Press the Down Arrow to see what other sort options are available. Sort by Page Number presents the bookmarks and the pages on which they can be found, very much like a Table of Contents. Sort by Subject is an alphabetic sort, akin to an Index. Note that sorting can take a few seconds. It’s a good idea to wait until you hear a chime before executing another sort. When sorting bookmarks in the online manual, for instance, it could take up to 20 seconds to hear the next chime. Instead of using the Tab key and the Up/Down arrow keys to select a sort option, Kurzweil 1000 provides a shortcut. From the Select a Bookmark area of the dialog, simply press Control S. Kurzweil 1000 cycles to the next sort option. For instance, if the current sort is by Subject, when you press Control S, Kurzweil 1000 would sort using the next sort option, which is Page Number and Level. Give bookmark sorting a try. Press Control S until you hear Sort by Subject. Remember that sorts can take a few seconds. Wait for the chime between sorts. As we mentioned before, bookmarks sorted by Subject are alphabetical. You can navigate this alphabetic list with the arrow keys, or by typing the first letter of the subject word in which you are interested. If you can type quickly, you may even type the first two or three letters of the word in order to skip all the words that come before your chosen topic and start with the same first letter. When you hear a bookmark whose topic interests you, press the Enter key. Kurzweil 1000 takes you to that subject and begins reading. Press the keypad Read key or the F5 key on the keyboard to stop reading. Once you press Enter, the bookmark dialog closes. To check out another sort type, press Alt R and the letter B keys to reopen the Bookmark dialog. Press Control S until you hear “Page Number and Level.” Use the Up and Down Arrow keys to go through the top level bookmarks. These would be equivalent to the Roman numeral information level in an outline. Kurzweil 1000 will tell you If there are bookmarks contained in the current bookmark. To check out the sub-level bookmarks, press the Right Arrow key. Then use the Up/Down Arrow key to go through the list of bookmarks at that same level. To go up a level, press the left arrow key. Here’s a challenge. Pause the tape and find an item called “Registering Online” and its level in the bookmarks dialog. Use the Page Number and Level sort. When you are done exploring bookmarks, press the Escape key to close the dialog. Section 9: Reading By now you know that to stop and start reading in Kurzweil 1000, you use either the "read" key on the keypad or the F5 key on the keyboard. In this section you’ll have the opportunity to try basic reading features including browsing, and learn how to go to a specific page and reread information. Along the way, we’ll introduce you to settings and how to change them so Kurzweil 1000 reads the way you want it to. You can read documents that you scan in, open from another program, import into or create in Kurzweil 1000. As soon as you scan or open a document, Kurzweil 1000 starts reading continuously. To begin this section, open the Kurzweil 1000 online manual by pressing the Alt and letter H key followed by the letter O. Have Kurzweil 1000 read continuously to you for a while. Notice that Kurzweil 1000 moves from page to page as it reads. Pay particular attention to when it switches voices. Kurzweil 1000 reads in a reading voice and when it encounters a change in font style, such as bolded or italic text, it switches from the reading voice to a message voice to call your attention to important, or emphasized, text. Don’t worry if you didn’t hear the two different voice. Emphasized text is the factory default and is a user-modifiable setting. If it is disabled, you wouldn’t hear the different voices. Press F5 to stop reading. Press F5 again to start reading. Notice that Kurzweil 1000 begins reading right where you left off. You may very well want Kurzweil 1000 to keep on reading. However, there may be times when you want to jump around in the text. So, let’s go over some navigation methods. You may or may not have noticed that Kurzweil 1000 reads by units. What you’re hearing is Kurzweil 1000 reading by sentences, which is the default reading unit. You can go to the beginning of the previous reading unit and repeat from that point, otherwise known as “rewinding,” by pressing the F6 key. You can go back to the beginning of the current unit and read from there by pressing the F7 key, or press F8 to “forward” to the next unit and start there. These are all convenient ways to repeat passages as you read. By the way, pressing the left shift key also rewinds and pressing the right shift key also forwards. It’s also possible to use the Arrow keys, the Home and End keys, and the Page Up and Page Down keys on the keyboard to skip around in text as you read. Pause the tape here and give the Home and End, and Up and Down arrow keys a try, then use them with the Control key. Listen for the page numbers. Welcome back. Did you discover where the Control plus the Home and the Control plus the End keys take you? Moving by small increments is fine, but what if you are reading a long document? That’s where the ability to browse comes in handy. You can browse text using Control plus Down Arrow and Control plus Up Arrow. The first key combination takes you to the first sentence of the next paragraph, while the second combination takes you to the first sentence of the previous paragraph. If you prefer, you can browse automatically by accessing the Read menu. Press Alt plus letter R and choose Start Browsing, or press Shift plus F5. Kurzweil 1000 reads the first sentence of each paragraph by default. Try using Shift plus F5 a few times. When you are done, press F5 to stop reading. Note that when you become more accustomed to changing Settings, which we’ll cover shortly, you can change many of the settings we just mentioned, such as Reading Units and the Browse Method. For instance, you can read by units of line and paragraph as well as sentence. You can browse by first sentence, last sentence or both. OK, what about going from page three to page 115? There are a few ways to go to a specific page. You can use the Read menu, use the shortcut for this function or use the Go to Page key. Try all of them now. Press Alt plus R. Then press the Down Arrow key. When you hear “Go to page” press Enter. Kurzweil 1000 opens the Go to Page dialog. Type a page number, say 115, then press the Enter key. Kurzweil 1000 tells you the page number and begins reading. Now, try Control G to go to page 7 and listen to Kurzweil 1000 read for a while, and then press the Go to Page key, which is the third square key from the left in the second to last row of the keypad. This time, go to page 69. Next, press Control G again and then type 200. When you’re ready to continue with the next exercise, press F5 to stop reading, but keep a mental note of page 200. Let’s suppose that as you read, you need some information that you encountered somewhere in this document. You can use the Find command to go to the information you need. First, press Control plus the Home key to return to the beginning of the document. Next, press Alt plus E, then the letter F, or use the shortcut, Control plus F to open the Find dialog. It’s possible to return to previous locations using the Last Position feature on the Read menu. Type the word, “registration,” then press Enter. Kurzweil 1000 takes you to the first instance of the word and tells you the page and line in which the word appears. If you want, you can press F5 to have Kurzweil 1000 read for a bit. When you’re ready, let’s go back to the last position. Recall that your last cursor position in this document was at page 200. Press Control F5 and listen for the page number. Try pressing Control F5 again. Where does this take you? The Last Position function is also accessible by pressing Alt plus R, then letter P. With this feature, you never miss a beat in your reading. This is a good time to pause the tape and try out the features we just covered. In the next section, you’ll find out how to customize reading. Here’s a quick review: To start and stop reading, use the F5 key. Use any of the following keystrokes to navigate and browse in a document: • F6 key to go to and start reading from the beginning of the previous reading unit. • F7 to go to and repeat from the beginning of the current unit. • F8 to skip ahead and start reading from the beginning of the next unit. Remember that you can change the reading unit. • Page Up, Page Down, Home, End and the Arrow keys. • Control plus the Up or Down key to go forward or backward to the first sentence in a paragraph. • Shift plus F5 to automatically browse the first sentence in paragraphs. Remember that you can use the browse method. • Go To Page key on the keypad or Control plus G to go to a specific page. • Control plus F5 to return to last cursor positions. If you plan on taking a break, press F4 to close the online manual. To exit Kurzweil 1000, press Alt F4. Section 10: Adjusting Kurzweil 1000 Reading In this section, you’ll be using the online manual again as we introduce you to settings and learn how to change reading settings. To open the manual, press the Alt and letter H key followed by the letter O key. As Kurzweil 1000 reads, note the reading speed and volume. Let’s increase the reading speed by pressing Alt + R, then choosing the Increase Reading Speed command. You can also use Alt plus R, then letter N. Kurzweil 1000 tells you the speed. Press F5 to start reading again. Alternatively, you can simply press F12 as you read continuously. Increase the speed multiple times and listen to hear the difference. To decrease the speed while reading, press the F11 key. Press F5 to stop the reading when you’re ready. To change the reading volume or fine-tune reading-related settings, you use the Voices settings dialog. Note that this is the first time you’re working with settings in this tutorial. so what exactly are settings? Settings may be options, adjustments, alternate ways of doing something, and/or your specifications for how you prefer Kurzweil 1000 to work. Every major function in Kurzweil 1000, from Reading and Scanning to Editing and System features, has associated settings. You can access the list of settings dialogs by pressing Alt plus T. Voices is the first item on the menu. Use the Up or Down arrow key to explore the other items on this menu, and then go back to Voices and press the Enter key. This opens the Voices dialog box. The cursor is in the “Role” list box. This is where you select the voice you want to modify. Recall that Kurzweil 1000 uses two voices: a reading voice to read text, and a message voice that alerts you to system events and that reads emphasized text. You can use the Up and Down Arrow keys in the Role box to select the voice for which you want to make changes. For now, let’s select “Reading Voice” as the Role. Press the Tab key to go to the Engine option. Kurzweil 1000 tells you the selected speech engine. If you have more than one speech output device or engine on your machine, you can use the Up and Down Arrows to move through the Engine list. We will just use the default here, but feel free to investigate what's available on your system. Just be aware that some of the engines take time to load. So as you Up and Down Arrow through the list, don't be too hasty in moving from one engine to the next. Press the Tab key again to go to the Voice list. Use the Up and Down Arrow keys to cycle through the available voices for the speech engine you have selected. Press the Tab key again to go to the Pitch control. You can use the Up and Down Arrow keys, or you can type the number you want. Tab again to go to the Speed control. Again, you can type the number of words per minute you want, or you can use the Up and Down Arrow keys to navigate to the desired number. The next press of the Tab key brings you to the Volume control. Kurzweil 1000 tells you the percentage of the volume. Again, you can type the desired number or use the Up and Down Arrow keys to set the percentage you want. You could also use Shift and the arrow keys to change the volume by larger amounts. Tab once more, and Kurzweil 1000 says, “test.” If you press Enter, you hear Kurzweil 1000 read a short passage which you can use to determine how well you like this particular voice and the settings you have chosen. If you decide you would like to change something, use the Shift Tab combination to get back to the setting you want to change. Make your desired adjustment. Press the Tab key to go forward to the Test button, press Enter and listen to the results. Once you are happy with the reading settings you made in this dialog, press Enter. For additional practice, you could follow these same steps to make adjustments to the message voice. You can even select one speech engine or device for your reading voice and another for your message voice. Again, the selections you have available depend on what has been installed on your particular computer. Here’s a quick review: • You now know how to access a Settings dialog, by pressing Alt T to open the Settings menu. • To change voice, or reading volume and speed, press Alt T and letter E to open the Voices Settings dialog. • You can also change the reading speed as you read by pressing the F11 or F12 key. In the next section, we’ll explore ways to change how Kurzweil 1000 pronounces words. Section 11: Changing the Pronunciation There may be times when artificial speech cannot emulate the true pronunciation of words. This may be the case for proper names, for instance. For those occasions, Kurzweil 1000 provides a simple way for you to edit pronunciation. When you hear the word whose pronunciation you would like to change, access the "new pronunciation” item on the Tools menu. Press the shortcut Control plus the letter N key, or press Alt O to open the tools menu and arrow down until you hear the item's name, then press Enter. Kurzweil 1000 says: "the word to be spoken is:" and says the word you want to correct. Press the Tab key, and Kurzweil 1000 says: "the pronunciation will be:” Here's where you type in a phonetic approximation of how you think the word should sound. For instance, your speech engine may say the word facet as face it. You could type “f a s s e t” to make Kurzweil 1000 say the word correctly. Here’s a tip for testing the pronunciation. While still working in the pronunciation dialog box, press Alt T to go to the test button, then press the Enter key. Kurzweil 1000 says the mispronounced word and then says how it will pronounce this word now. If you like the new pronunciation, Tab to the OK command and press Enter. By default whenever Kurzweil 1000 encounters the word whose pronunciation you corrected, it will use what you typed as a guide to pronounce this word, regardless of whether or not the word appears as upper or lower case letters. There might be instances where you would want your pronunciation to take effect only if the word in the text is in upper case, such as occurs with abbreviations like FBI. You can do so in this pronunciation dialog box. Press Alt S or use the tab key until you hear “Case Sensitivity.” Press the Up or Down Arrow key until you hear “Enabled.” It’s possible to become so involved with correcting pronunciations that you forget what you are reading about. But this feature is a good one to keep in mind for those times when you find yourself coming across the same mispronounced words or names in the texts you read. It can actually be rather fun to come up with some creative spellings that will fool the speech engine into pronouncing things the way you want to hear them pronounced. Coming up next, we’ll delve into more settings. Section 12: Specifying and Saving Settings If you experimented at all with the voice adjustments we talked about in the previous section, and you subsequently closed Kurzweil 1000 and opened it again at some point, you no doubt discovered that the adjustments you made to the reading and/or message voices are no longer in effect. Things have gone back to the way they were before you made those adjustments. Why did that happen? And how can you keep from having to make those adjustments each time you close and open Kurzweil 1000? We’ll answer these questions in this section. Let’s take a look at the Settings menu again. Recall that, when we showed you how to change voices, we did so by opening the Voices dialog box from the Settings menu. Let's go to the settings menu now. Press Alt T. Kurzweil 1000 says: "Voices." Tap the Down Arrow key to explore the items in this menu. You should hear: Scanning, Recognition, Reading, General, Display, Scanner Margins, Configuration, Verbosity, and several Settings functions. After each one, Kurzweil 1000 tells you that it opens a dialog. As you can see, there are certainly many adjustments you can make. For now, press the Alt key to close the menu. Next we’re going to save a settings file. When you open Kurzweil 1000, a default settings file is loaded. This file contains all the various settings for all the categories you just heard listed in the Settings menu. If you make adjustments to things like the reading and system voices when this default settings file is loaded and save the file, then the next time you open Kurzweil 1000, you will notice the changes. Try this now, stop the tape and make some changes to your system and reading voices. Start the tape again when you're satisfied with your changes and want to learn how to save them. Ready to save your settings? Access the settings menu by pressing Alt T. Use the Up or Down Arrow keys to navigate through the menu items until you hear, "save settings: Opens a dialog," then press Enter. Pressing Alt plus the T then the V keys does the same thing. The Save Settings dialog opens, and Kurzweil 1000 says "please select or enter a name for the settings file. default." Kurzweil 1000 lets you know that the default settings file is the current selection. You have a few choices at this point. You can save your changed settings and make them the default by pressing the Enter key. Kurzweil 1000 will load this default file each time you open the software. Alternatively, you can save your changed settings to another existing settings file by using the Up and Down Arrow keys and when you hear the filename you want, press Enter. Or you can save your settings to a completely new file. Let’s save to a new settings file. Type a new settings file name, for example, “my settings.” Then press the Enter key. The changes you made to the voices are now in the “my settings” file. You might be wondering why you'd ever need more than one settings file, or when it would be good to save settings in some settings file other than the default. If you plan to use Kurzweil 1000 to do word processing, you may want a settings file which contains settings that make it easier to access shortcut keys for paragraph style and font attributes. If you scan a wide variety of books and documents, you might want to build settings files which contain settings optimized for the various types of books and documents you frequently scan. You could end up with several settings files, each of which should have a name that reflects something about when it is used. Thus, you might have files called word processing, paperbacks, magazine and so on. Don't feel as though you have to make separate settings files if you want to scan different types of books and documents. Just remember that the option exists. And if you find yourself making lots of adjustments to the default settings before you scan a certain kind of book or do a certain task, then consider saving the adjusted settings in their own settings file. Press F5 to hear my settings changes in action. When you’re done, press F5 again to stop reading. Now let’s learn how to load a settings file. Access the settings menu by pressing Alt T, and press the Up or Down Arrow until you hear "load settings item” then press Enter. Or you could type Alt T and the letter L. Kurzweil 1000 says "select a settings file to load" and then gives the name of the currently selected file, which is default. Press the Down Arrow to find the “my settings” file. Since “my settings” is in effect, let’s load the Default settings file. Use the Up Arrow key until you hear “Default,” then press Enter. Kurzweil 1000 tells you “The settings have been loaded from Default.” Press F5 to hear the default settings in action. There’s more to settings files than we have covered here. But this is certainly enough to enable you to efficiently use a variety of settings files you may wish to create. In the next section, you’ll learn about the Verbosity Settings. At the end of that section, take another opportunity to create another settings files and see what happens when you load it. Section 13: Changing Verbosity Settings Over and over again, you’ll find that Kurzweil 1000 is a highly customizable software program, and the Verbosity feature is yet another prime example of how Kurzweil 1000 accommodates your personal preferences. The Verbosity settings let you determine if you want Kurzweil 1000 to provide additional information for certain events in the software, and how you want that information presented. This can be very helpful if you are a new user or if you want additional help in orienting yourself within the program. As you become an experienced user, you can disable notification from Kurzweil 1000 using the Verbosity dialog. Let’s take a closer look at some of the Verbosity options. Press Alt plus T, then letter Y to open the Verbosity Settings dialog. Use the Tab key to explore the different options, which are in this order: Event, Signal, Message, Restore Default, and OK and Cancel. Event is a list of all the places in Kurzweil 1000 where you can tailor how Kurzweil 1000 tells you what’s happening. Starting Kurzweil 1000, which the system just announced is the first event on the list. Press the Tab key to hear its signal. The default is Message, which means that when you start up Kurzweil 1000, you hear a message. Press the Down Arrow key to see what other signals are in the list. Chime lets you select from a list of sound files. Press the Down Arrow key; the next option is to disable any notification when Kurzweil 1000 starts. Listen to the message the system uses when starting Kurzweil 1000. Press the Down Arrow key until you hear “Message.” Press the Tab key to listen to this message. Did you notice that it said percent, percent? The system uses the percent sign to substitute for variables. In this case the variable is the Version number for the Kurzweil 1000 product installed on your machine. You can edit this message using typical editing keys. If you want to restore the default message, press the Tab key to go to the Restore Default command and press Enter. Press Tab until you hear Starting Kurzweil 1000 as the event. Press the Down Arrow key to select another Event you want to change. The next event in this list is Exiting from Kurzweil 1000. By default, this option is disabled. Try selecting a chime for it. Press the Tab key to go to Signal. Press the Down arrow key until you hear “Chime.” To test the chime, press Alt T. To browse for other sounds, press Alt B. Kurzweil 1000 presents other sound files. Use the Up and Down Arrow keys to select another one, then press Enter. When you are done making changes in the Verbosity dialog, press the Enter key. Remember, to save these settings, use Alt T and letter V. The next time you start Kurzweil 1000, use Alt T and letter L to load the new settings file. If you saved the changes to the default settings file, Kurzweil 1000 applies the changes automatically. Time for another break? Come back refreshed to go through some scanning. Section 14: Scanning In this section, we’ll talk about using Kurzweil 1000 to scan printed material. You’ll actually scan a page, and find the answers to some important questions like: • What actually happens when you scan? • What kinds of things can you scan? • And, if you don't like the results, what you can do to try to improve them? To go through this section, you’ll need a page from the Installation and New Features Guide. Be sure to have it ready. First, let’s scan a page. Place it on the scanner glass. Close the scanner lid and press the F9 key on the main keyboard or press the "start and stop scan" key, which is the right-most key in the second row of the keypad. The scanning process begins. Typically, the scanner takes a picture of the image and passes the image to the OCR engine. Depending on your Verbosity settings, you may hear Kurzweil 1000 tell you how much of the recognition process has been completed. When recognition is complete there’s a further announcement that the top of the page is at the left, right or wherever of the scanner. Following that message, Kurzweil 1000 should begin reading the recognized text. That’s all there is to scanning. The majority of the time, your scanned document should read accurately. However, recognition technology is not completely error-proof; sometimes, it can produce results you don’t expect or want. There is a great deal you can do to improve the quality of the scanned output, and some settings you can adjust to ensure that you get the best possible scanning quality. Let's start with the things you can do that don't depend on making adjustments to Kurzweil 1000. When you scan a book or a single sheet of paper, it’s important to make sure that the page or pages you want to scan are as flat as possible against the scanner glass, and that all of the material to be scanned fits on the scanner glass, with nothing hanging over the side or off the end. If the scanner can't see a portion of the page, it can't take the picture, and you will miss some of the text. It is particularly important with books to make sure that the portion of the pages closest to the binding maintains good contact with the scanner glass. To do that, you may have to open the book and bend it back before you start scanning it, or press down on the book binding. What else can you scan with Kurzweil 1000? You can use Kurzweil 1000 to recognize U.S. currency. To do this, place the bill on your scanner with its long side at the back of the scanner. Press the Shift key and the F9 key. When the scanning process is complete, Kurzweil 1000 announces the bill’s denomination. You can scan another bill at that point by pressing the Enter key. If you don't have another bill, press Escape. What are some things that Kurzweil 1000 cannot scan? You can't use Kurzweil 1000 to scan hand-written text. Nor can you use it to scan a musical score or advanced mathematics texts. And, while it is possible to use the FineReader OCR engine to scan some computer programming textbooks, the results you achieve may not be sufficiently accurate without some proof-reading assistance from a sighted person. Particularly complex page layouts, extremely fancy font styles and wildly varied and contrasting text or paper colors can also seriously affect the quality of your scanned output. But with all that, there is still a tremendous amount of printed material which you can access by means of Kurzweil 1000 and your scanner. If you scanned a document in this section, press F4 to close it. Because you’ve never saved this document, Kurzweil 1000 tells you that the open file has unsaved changes and asks if you want to save them. For now, press the letter N key for No. Kurzweil 1000 closes the document without saving it. In a later section, you’ll learn more about saving and managing documents. Before we leave scanning, we’d like to mention a handy tool, albeit a more advanced one, that helps you determine how well the system recognized the document you scanned, how much confidence it had in the resulting image, how many characters are illegible and questionable, how many pages were recognized and how many corrections Kurzweil 1000 made automatically. This tool is called Recognition Statistics and you can find it in the Tools menu. Learn more about it by opening the dialog and pressing the F1 key or going to the manual. The next section covers settings, in general, and a few of the many adjustments you can make to fine-tune scanning. Section 15: Scanning Settings In this section, we’ll take a look at a few settings that you can adjust to influence the scanning and recognition process. As you use Kurzweil 1000, you may be one of those people who become quite adept at changing settings, but if you are a new user, the information we’re about to go over may seem a bit daunting. We encourage you to go through this and the material in the next section about Settings Tabs as an introduction. But don’t worry if working with settings doesn’t become second nature. You can revisit this and any other sections in the Tutorial when you’re ready. To access Scanning Settings, press Alt and letter T keys, then press the letter S to open the Scanner Settings dialog. Kurzweil 1000 says that the mode is scan and recognize. Press the Tab key to go to the next item. In this case, the Page Orientation setting. The default is automatic. You can speed up the recognition process by changing this setting to match the orientation of pages on your scanner, once you know it. Press the Tab key again to go to the next setting; Kurzweil 1000 announces that "static thresholding" will be used. Think of thresholding as a kind of limit. If you go under the limit, one set of actions occurs, if you go over the limit, another set of actions occurs. In the case of scanning, we’re talking about the dots on a page and whether each one is black, white, gray, color, or some shade in between. How Kurzweil 1000 determines this is based on the thresholding and brightness settings you use. Static, the default thresholding, is best when there is a distinct brightness difference between the text and the background, and when that difference is consistent throughout the page and document. It’s the fastest setting, and more often than not, you’d use the Static Thresholding with the Brightness setting, giving you more control of the final image. However, it may take multiple tries to get the most effective results. Press the Down arrow key to go to the Dynamic Thresholding setting. When you choose this setting, Kurzweil 1000 takes a sample from different parts of the page and assigns a threshold for each region. This is a particularly helpful adjustment to make when scanning multi-colored pages such as magazines and brochures. The next Thresholding option is “Grayscale,” which is useful only with FineReader. Press the Down arrow key again. Grayscale doesn’t use any thresholding and presents the image in multi-shades of gray. Keep in mind that this option slows down scanning and recognition. There’s one additional item in the Thresholding list, and that’s Color. Keep this option in mind for scanning and recognizing color originals. Scanning in color allows you to magnify, view and possibly print color images. As with the Grayscale option, this setting can significantly slow down scanning and recognition. Now press the Tab key to go to the Brightness setting. Kurzweil 1000 tells you this is set to 50. You can adjust brightness either with the Up or Down Arrow key, or by typing any number between 0 and 100. If the print on the page is very dark, try a higher brightness number. If the print is very light, lowering the brightness might yield better results. You can read more about this adjustment, and hear a list of typical errors to help you determine which way to adjust brightness in the Online Manual. And remember, you can always use the F1 key for additional information about unusual settings. Press Escape to close the Scanning Settings dialog without making any changes. A quick note about scanning settings before we move on. There are people who don’t mind adjusting these settings to achieve the best possible results. However, for those of us who prefer not to have to experiment, keep in mind that there is the Scanning Optimization feature. It’s accessible from the Scan menu by pressing Alt plus S, then letter O. In the dialog, simply select the settings you want to optimize, press Enter, then scan. Why not let Kurzweil 1000 do the work for you. The next group of settings for exploration is the Recognition settings. You’ll hear about two specific settings: Column Identification and Two-Page Mode. Press Alt T and the letter C keys to access the Recognition settings dialog. Kurzweil 1000 says "column identification is enabled.” This feature is useful for recognizing newspaper and magazine articles. But you may want to disable it when you scan a table of contents or a play, for instance. With this feature enabled, Kurzweil 1000 would read the chapter names in the table of contents first followed by the list of all page numbers, thinking they are two separate columns. Or in the case of a play, it would read the speakers’ names first, followed by the text in the speeches. So when scanning material, consider whether or not there is text that the system might mistake for columns, and disable or enable this feature accordingly. You would definitely want to disable it when scanning materials that do not have columns; this would include books such as novels. Press the Tab key once to go from the Column Identification setting to the Two Page setting. Here’s where you can tell Kurzweil 1000 how many pages you want it to recognize per scan. The default is 1 page, and this certainly makes sense, if you are scanning single sheets of paper, or if you are scanning just one page of a book at a time. If, however, you want to scan both facing pages in a book at once, and you would like to keep the number of pages in your scan the same as those in the book, then you would want to change this setting to two pages. Other options in this dialog include White on Black if you have white text on a dark color background and Speckle Removal if you think the original may not be clean enough to scan well. Press the Escape key to close the Scanning Settings dialog. Another scanning-related group of settings is Margins. By default, scanner margins are disabled. This is probably the best choice, except if you find yourself scanning a lot of mass-market paperback books. The most efficient way to scan paperbacks is to place the book so that its top is to the back of your scanner, and the book is open flat across the width of the scanner. If you do that, you will notice that there is a large space at the bottom, where the book does not cover the scanner glass. Then enable the Margins setting. Access the scanner margins dialog by pressing Alt T and letter M. Or you could, as with all the other settings in this menu, go to this one by pressing Up or Down Arrow and pressing Enter when you hear Kurzweil 1000 say "scanner margins." Once in the dialog box, Kurzweil 1000 tells you the margins are disabled. Press the Down Arrow key to the “Autosize” option, and press Enter, then press F9 or the Start Scan key to scan. Note that it takes two scans before Kurzweil 1000 sets the margins when you select the Autosize option. And be sure to position the book in the same spot on the scanner consistently. Now when you scan a paperback, Kurzweil 1000 will adjust the margins accordingly. You can, of course, make a change to any of the four margin settings by typing a number to replace what is there without using the "auto-size" feature. But be careful that you don't type too large a number, or your scanner bar won't go down far enough to include the entire page in the image it sends to be recognized, and you will miss some text. This would be a good point for a break. While doing so, think about the types of things you want to scan, and how you might like to adjust the default settings to make your scanning more efficient. Press Escape now to close the Margins Settings before going to the next section. Section 16: Kurzweil 1000 Settings Tabs When you were working with scanning settings, did you happen to notice that you had to do a bit of jumping in and out of dialogs to go to different groups of settings? You used the Settings menu to open a settings dialog, you then made changes to it and closed it. Subsequently, to make changes in another group of settings, you had to repeat the process. While this is perfectly acceptable, there is a more efficient way, especially if you are planning to make changes to multiple groups of settings. All the dialog boxes associated with items found in the settings menu are really part of a much larger control known as a multi-tab or multi-page dialog box. Think of these tabs as the tabs at the top of physical file folders. When you have opened one of the dialog boxes from the settings menu, you can navigate among all the different tabs, each of which contains all the options associated with a group of settings. You can make changes to any or all of the various tabs, then press Enter to save them all and return to your document. Let’s navigate among the different tabs in the settings dialog to get a sense of how it’s done. Press Alt T to go to the settings menu. Use the Up or Down Arrow to hear the settings menu items. Press the Enter key to select an item and open the associated dialog. In any Settings dialog, you can press Control plus Tab to open the next settings tab. Press Shift plus Control plus Tab to open the previous settings tab. Alternatively, you can press Shift plus Tab until you hear the current tab title. Once in the Tab titles, you can use the Left or Right Arrow key to open adjacent tabs. From left to right, the tabs are Voices, Scanning, Recognition, Reading, General, Display, Margins, Configuration, and Verbosity. The order in which you’ll hear them may be different depending on the tab item you selected. You can also use the Alt key and the mnemonic for a topic. Try it now. Press Alt and letter G to go to the General tab; then from the General tab, press Alt and letter Y to open the Verbosity settings dialog. To recap. • Kurzweil 1000 settings are accessible from the Settings menu. Selecting any item from the settings menu opens an associated dialog. • From within any of the Settings dialogs, you have access to the other topics which are presented in multi-tab format. • From within any Settings dialog, Control plus Tab and Shift plus Control plus Tab opens adjacent Settings dialogs. You can use the Left and Right arrow keys to move back and forth among these tabs, or use the Alt key plus the mnemonic key associated with each topic. • You can make changes to any or all of the settings dialogs, then accept everything at once by pressing Enter after you’ve made your last change. Or you can cancel all the changes by pressing Escape. Remember, because Settings tabs are actually dialogs, you can use the Tab key or Shift Tab combination to move among the options. To view list items, use the Up or Down key. This is a good point for a break. Press the F4 key twice to exit from Kurzweil 1000.