Kurzweil 1000 Version 11

January 12, 2008

This is a update for Kurzweil 1000 Version 11 addressing the new file format used in downloading books from Bookshare.org.

December 29th, 2008

This is the third update for version 11 of the Kurzweil 1000. It is a cumulative update - that is, it contains all of the changes that were in the last two updates (11.02 and 11.01), and a few more as well.

It should only be installed on a system that contains version 11, 11.01, or 11.02. 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. If that is not possible, you can get it directly from the following URL

Changes introduced by Update 11.03.

We have included a file containing a number of pronunciation changes that are specific for the Eloquence speech engine, when using American English voices. These were created by one of our beta testers, Amir Soleimani. They are in a file called ENURoot.dic, which you will find in your "My Documents\Kurzweil Educational Systems" folder. If you would like to use these pronunciation changes, move that file to the folder "C:\Program Files\Common Files\SpeechWorks\ETI-Eloquence 6.1\user name", where "user name"should be replaced with your user name. Particularly on Vista systems, it is extremely important that you not be running any application that uses Eloquence when you make this change (including, of course, Kurzweil 1000 and the K1000 Calendar Application). If you find that the change has no effect, you may find that your change is being ignored due to a virtual store. To fix that, you need to change Windows Explorer so that it shows you hidden folders, and then use Windows Explorer to find the following folder "C:\Users\user name.domain name\AppData\Local\Virtual Store\Program Files\Common Files\SpeechWorks\ETI-Eloquence 6.1\user name, where "user name" should be replaced with your user name, and "domain name" with the name of your domain (if any). Then delete that folder.

(1) Crash when merging many files with long

file names. If the total length of the characters in all of the file names for files being merged exceeded 32,000, a crash would occur. This has been fixed.

(2) File Corruption.

When "ignore all" is used in the regular or ranked spell checker, and the file being checked is later saved as a KES file, the ignored word is saved in a particular location. If enough words are saved such that that location exceeded 32 kilobytes in size, the file could be subtly corrupted, or, as was more likely, a crash would occur the next time the file was opened. It is possible that there are other ways in which this file corruption could have occurred. It's fixed.

(3) Use of network drive in backing up or restoring settings.

If the current directory could only be described using a UNC (Uniform Naming Convention - beginning with two back slashes), then backing up or restoring settings would crash. This has been fixed.

(4) Use of European audio converters in the United States.

If a customer's system had an audio converter (a codec) that used periods as thousand separators when describing its characteristics, it would cause problems for us on systems that used commas as thousand separators. We've worked around that.

(5) Page Breaks in Baen Books.

Baen Books started using an RTF tag "\pagebb" which we didn't support as a page break. We've added support so that we can observe the page breaks in those documents.

(6) Brittanica Encyclopedia.

Changes to the format of this encyclopedia on the web required changes on our side to continue support of both the full and the concise Britannica Encyclopedia.

(7) Pronouncing Backslashes.

If the punctuation level was set to All, each backslash character found in a document was read twice.

(8) Disabling Table Identification.

We've found some documents that where the order of recognized text is improved considerably if we disable table identification in the character recognizer. In the past, we disabled table identification only for reading - not for recognition. With this release, when the table identification setting in the reading settings dialog is disabled, we will disable it for recognition as well. This is something of a hack, since it should be done with a separate setting, so you should expect this approach to change in a future release. However, turning off table identification can help on documents like invoices, where the information is too widely separated to be recognized properly as tables.

(9) Ignore All in the Spell Checker.

Ignore All could cause the spell checker to get stuck. Luckily, you could cancel with escape, and then immediately continue. The problem is now fixed.

(10) Cursor position after a Paste.

Most applications, including NotePad, WordPad, and Word, position the cursor immediately after a block of text that has just been pasted into a document. K1000 was positioning it before. We've changed that to match other applications.

(11) Following Links in Wikipedia.

You could get a runtime error when activating certain links in certain Wikipedia articles. This has been fixed.

(12) Scanner Driver Support.

Some interesting changes have been made to the latest round of drivers from Canon, making it possible for us to support them in the non-native (buffered) mode, but breaking our ability to support them in the native mode. We've fixed our interface to support them in both modes.

(13) Printing Images.

Rare but unpredictable crashes could occur while printing images. We've fixed at least one source of these.

(14) Recognizing while Honoring Line Endings.

If the Line Endings setting in the Reading Settings Dialog was set to "Honor", extra paragraph endings were introduced while recognizing images. This has been fixed.

(15) Keeping Images when recognizing PDF Files.

If you keep images when you open a PDF file, the resulting KES file could be very large - sometimes over 24 megabytes per page. This occurs when the PDF file itself is in color, as the image of each page was stored as an uncompressed color image. We now pay attention to the fact that the recognized image was in color, compress it, and also threshold and retain a black and white version. This will have some impact on rerecognition of a page derived from a color PDF file, but that is better than running out of disk space.

Changes introduced by Update 11.02.

(1) Newer verbosity events and settings files.

Three of the newer verbosity events were not being saved into or loaded from settings files. These are: Reading past a form field, Completion of a long recognition task, and Completion of audio file creation. They are now saved and restored properly.

(2) Context reporting in the form field dialog.

In the form field dialog, Control+F7 should provide a context report - i.e., it should read the text that is fairly close to the field itself. It wasn't, but is now.

(3) Entering registration information.

If an ampersand was typed into the account field for online registration, registration would fail. That character is no longer allowed in that field.

(4) Language specifiers when exporting text.

Rich Text Format (RTF) output always included a markup that indicated that the default language was American English. If that markup is not provided, the default language should be set based on the default language for your computer - a considerably better default. Note that RTF output is the starting point for most of the word processing formats that we support. That markup has been removed.

(5) Online Repository Changes.

When online repository sites change, we sometimes find that we need to change our code to maintain support for them. Changes were made for Baen Free Books and for NFB publications.

(6) European Dates in the Appointment Calendar.

The Appointment calendar application did not support the appropriate date format for regions other than the United States and Canada. That has been fixed.

(7) Inverted FAX Images.

Several customers have reported that the image of a received fax is sometimes inverted (that is, black becomes white, and white becomes black). We have fixed at least one source for this problem.

(8) Reading XML files.

We were not reading XML files encoded with UTF-8 properly. This has been fixed.

(9) Saving over the top of an existing file.

We found a problem such that if someone saves a document over an existing one, and the new document is shorter than the old one, and the format is RTF, or a format derived from RTF (like Word), pieces of the old document could end up being appended to the new document. This didn't seem to happen consistently, but it could happen. The problem has been fixed.

(10) Creating Audio files in Europe.

In locales where a comma is used as a decimal separator, audio file creation would sometimes fail. This has been fixed.

(11) Hanging when saving a file in a format other than KES.

The database that keeps bookmarks, notes, and file positions for documents other than KES could be corrupted in such a way that attempts to update that database would cause the Kurzweil 1000 to hang or fail. We have fixed the source for the corruption.

(12) Save Partial Settings.

Save Partial settings allows the user to check those settings files that should be saved, and provides a short cut - Control+A - to check all of them. Unfortunately it then only updated the currently selected setting rather than all checked settings. This has been fixed.

(13) Default Paper Size.

Documents in RTF format or in formats derived from RTF usually have a default paper size. Kurzweil 1000 was setting that size to 8.5 by 11, which is reasonable for the United States, but not elsewhere. In locales that warrant it, the paper size now defaults to A4.

(14) Bookmarks and the creation of Audio Files.

DAISY audio files can contain multiple audio files. The last bookmark created for each of those audio files was sometimes damaged or dropped altogether. This has been fixed. In addition, a problem exists with SAPI 5 voices and the Windows Vista operating system that can seriously degrade the accuracy of audio bookmarks - we've worked around that problem as well.

(15) RealSpeak Solo Support.

RealSpeak Solo voices would occasionally hang while reading. That's been fixed.

(16) Pitch Settings.

In order to allow for a setting that is precisely in the middle of a voice's pitch range,that range is now 1 through 21. This makes a pitch value of 10 match the typical default for a SAPI 5 voice.

(17) Encyclopedia Britannica.

A number of changes were made to the web site that supports the paid version of Encyclopedia Britannica, breaking our access to that site. We've fixed that access, and improved our conversion of its articles.

Changes introduced by Update 11.01.

(1) Cursor Position in a Document after use of Show Images.

Version 11 always had the cursor positioned at the end of the current page after use of Show Images. The proper behavior is to have the cursor positioned at the beginning of the same word that held the cursor position in the Show Images dialog when it was closed.

(2) Downloading from Web Braille.

The base download link for documents found on Web Braille changed, breaking out ability to download Web Braille documents. We've fixed it (again).

(3) Dictionary Dialog Problems.

If you misspell a word when attempting to look it up in the dictionary, K1000 will suggest a possible correction. If you reject that correction, portions of the dictionary dialog are disabled. This has been fixed.

(4) Systems with Lots of Speech Engines.

If your system has a lot of speech engines, certain actions - such as modifying the voice settings - could be quite slow. Some work has gone into speeding them up.

(5) Misuse of a Control Key.

Control+X was used to get the context of a form field, both in the form fill dialog and in the image dialog. This is obviously a bad choice, since it should be reserved for the cutting text. Control+F7 is now the keystroke that should be used to get context. Online help has been modified to reflect this change.

(6) Button Order in the Form Fill Dialog.

In general, we prefer to make the Cancel button, if present, the last button available in a dialog box. The last four buttons of the Form Fill Dialog, though, were OK, Cancel, Next, and Back. They have been reordered now as Next, Back, OK, and Cancel.

(7) Ranked Spelling and the Case of Corrections.

Ranked Spelling now makes the word case of a correction the same as the word case of the misspelled word, unless making that change would result in a correction that was identical to the misspelled word. Word case, by the way, can be All Caps, Initial Cap, or all lower.

(8) Electronic Content with Restricted Access.

KES files can be stamped in a manner that is designed to provide access to their content, but protect it from copying. In some cases, these files have to be registered with the purchaser's name and a registration code. Support for these types of files (which are not yet available to the public) has been added in this update.

(9) Wikipedia References and Notes.

Some Wikipedia articles have subjections titled "References and "Notes" which contain numbered items. The numbers are hyperlink destinations, but those destinations were not recognized as such by Kurzweil 1000. This has been fixed.

(10) Access to Baen Books.

The Baen Book online repository was changed dramatically, breaking our ability to access it. We've fixed it.

(11) Fujitsu Scanner Support.

We've improved our ability to support the Fujitsu 5120C.

(12) The Virtual Printer and Documents with Mixed Orientations.

When a document contains different pages with different orientations, and when those orientation changes were respected during a print request with the virtual printer, pages would be lost. This has been fixed.

(13) Windows Vista and Audio Compression.

The way Audio Compressors and Decompressors are organized and accessed changed somewhat in Vista, breaking our ability to create MP3 files. This has been fixed.

(14) A Form Recognition Failure.

Form fill out would fail for certain unusual forms. This has been fixed.

(15) Reporting the Page Orientation.

The report of the orientation of a page after recognition was frequently incorrect when Fine Engine was used as the recognition engine. This has been fixed.

(16) Layout Information and ScanSoft.

Layout Information was sometimes missing from major portions of a recognized page when ScanSoft was used as the recognizer. It is not entirely clear yet, but this problem may have caused another which has been reported, but not yet duplicated here: repeated text. The first problem is fixed, and we hope the second one is as well.

(17) Very Slow Opens for PDF or RTF.

If a PDF file or an RTF file contained a very large and complex image, KURZWEIL 1000 could take a very long time to open the file. We have sped it up considerably.

(18) Scanning within Microsoft Word.

If a page was scanned in such that it needed to be rotated in order to be recognized within Microsoft Word, a failure would occur. This has been fixed.

(19) DOCX File Support.

If you have Office 2007 on your system, you will find that you can open and create Word 2007 files, whose extensions are .docx. If you have an earlier version of word, but have loaded the office conversion updates which provide DOCX support for older versions of Office, you'll find that you can open .docx files, but not create them.

(20) RealSpeak Solo and Creation of Audio Files.

Audio File creation was consistently failing with certain RealSpeak Solo voices. This has been fixed.

(21) Unvoiced Error Dialogs.

Opening certain RTF files caused error messages to be displayed in the screen. These were unvoiced, and required the operator to press enter in order to continue. They are now suppressed.

(22) The Names of Months in the Calendar Application.

When some speech engines were in use, the names of months spoken in the calendar application were truncated to their three letter abbreviations, making them difficult to understand. This has been fixed.

(23) Quickly Adding an Event in the Calendar Application.

A text box and a button labeled "Quick Add" has been added to the main window of the Calendar Application. Type or paste in a description of the event in the text box, press the Quick Add button, and the new event will be automatically added. The contents of the text box are analyzed automatically. For example, if you type "meeting 10 am Thursday", a onetime event will be created for Thursday at 10 AM. If you type "meeting 3 PM every Friday in the conference room", an event will be created that repeats once a week. In a similar manner, "Dad's birthday June 30" will create a onetime event, while "Dad's birthday June 30 every year" will create an event that repeats each year. You may still need to review what was entered using the Add Event Dialog, but this approach can be convenient.

(24) GW Micro's Braille Sense (tm) and the Send To Dialog.

Braille Sense (tm) is now a supported device in the File->Send To dialog.

(25) ScanSoft Recognition and Table Identification.

When ScanSoft 15 was used as the recognition engine, table identification was broken. This has been fixed.

(26) The Kurzweil 1000 File Dialog.

If you changed the text box containing a file name in the K1000 file dialog, but then tabbed to the list of available files and pressed any key - including, for example, the control key or the shift key - the text box would be cleared. This has been fixed. The text box will change, of course, if you select a file in the list of available files.

(27) Audio File Creation.

If you have things set so as to change voices when text should be emphasized, audio creation would occasionally fail. This has been fixed.

(28) Using an Existing Registration on a New Machine.

You can use your existing account name and serial number when you install Kurzweil 1000 on a new machine. The account name, though, was not saved properly on the new machine, and wouldn't show up properly in the Help->About screen. It does now.

(29) The Common File Dialog and Vista.

If you choose to use the common file dialogs in Kurzweil 1000, if your operating system is Vista, and if you tried to delete a file in the file open dialog, a confirmation dialog would come up which would not respond to any keystrokes or mouse clicks. You would be forced to shut down Kurzweil 1000 from the task manager. This has been fixed.

(30) Access to Web Braille and Vista.

Our access to Web Braille was compromised by the use of an operating system function that did not behave correctly under Vista. We've now worked around that problem.