To begin using the LEADTOOLS OCR document toolkit, the user must initialize an OCR document handle. This handle provides the user with access to the OCR engine and the internal OCR document list of pages. The handle is initialized by calling the Startup method. This handle is passed to many of the other LEADTOOLS OCR Document methods, so this method must be called before calling other LEADTOOLS OCR methods.

Once the Startup method has been called, you may opt to load engine settings saved in a file into the engine. To load saved settings from a file, call LoadSettings. To save engine settings into a file for later use, call SaveSettings. Please note that you must call Startup before you can call SaveSettings. If you call SaveSettings after calling Startup, but before you have set any engine settings, the settings files will contain the default engine settings.

While working with the OCR engine, you can receive progress notifications through Progress event for all processes performed by the OCR engine if you call EnableEvents. Also, to stop receiving the progress notification event, call DisableEvents.

When the OCR document handle is no longer needed, the user must free the handle by calling Shutdown. At this point the OCR document handle becomes invalid. Before recognizing any more pages, the user must establish a new OCR document handle by calling Startup.