Scan and Recognize from within Microsoft Word
The requests for this feature have perplexed me for years. Kurzweil 1000 costs more than commercially available, mainstream OCR packages. What people are paying for, presumably, is the inclusion of all sorts of features that make sense mainly for the Blind, and a seamless audible interface. If you scan from within Microsoft Word, you pretty much lose all of that. What I finally came to realize is that the people who wanted this feature didn't want to use it constantly - instead, its a convenience when you happen to already be in Word, and you happen to want to work from material that is in print. So, this time around, we added the feature.
Suppose you are in Microsoft Word, and you wish to scan a page. At the bottom of the Insert menu, you will find a menu item called "Kurzweil Scan and Recognize". Activate that menu item, and a page will be scanned and recognized. The results will flow into your Word document, beginning at your current cursor position. Kurzweil 1000 doesn't need to be open.
You can adjust certain scanning and recognition options from within Microsoft Word. To do so, activate the "Kurzweil Options..." menu item near the bottom of the Tools menu. A dialog box will come up. Its contents include a list of scanners, so that you can select the scanner source, a slider for your brightness setting, a list to select the scan type (black and white, grayscale, or color - note no dynamic thresholding here!), a list for the OCR engine, a check box to enable or disable column identification, another checkbox to enable or disable despeckling, and a list of possible recognition languages.
That's about it. Its important to note that there are good reasons to think that this is not the way you want to do all of your scanning. Important settings might be missing at the moment, but the main thing is that you can't read and edit the document at the same time that you are scanning it. Remember that the recognition results will come in starting at your cursor position. Fiddling with that position while recognition was in progress would cause a lot of trouble.
We have gotten this feature to work with Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007. It does not work with Word 95 or Word 97.
Suppose you are in Microsoft Word, and you wish to scan a page. At the bottom of the Insert menu, you will find a menu item called "Kurzweil Scan and Recognize". Activate that menu item, and a page will be scanned and recognized. The results will flow into your Word document, beginning at your current cursor position. Kurzweil 1000 doesn't need to be open.
You can adjust certain scanning and recognition options from within Microsoft Word. To do so, activate the "Kurzweil Options..." menu item near the bottom of the Tools menu. A dialog box will come up. Its contents include a list of scanners, so that you can select the scanner source, a slider for your brightness setting, a list to select the scan type (black and white, grayscale, or color - note no dynamic thresholding here!), a list for the OCR engine, a check box to enable or disable column identification, another checkbox to enable or disable despeckling, and a list of possible recognition languages.
That's about it. Its important to note that there are good reasons to think that this is not the way you want to do all of your scanning. Important settings might be missing at the moment, but the main thing is that you can't read and edit the document at the same time that you are scanning it. Remember that the recognition results will come in starting at your cursor position. Fiddling with that position while recognition was in progress would cause a lot of trouble.
We have gotten this feature to work with Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007. It does not work with Word 95 or Word 97.
posted by K1000Engineer at 3:30 PM
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