What better way to start off a new decade than with partner recognition of LEAD's success within the marketplace? We are excited to announce that LEAD Technologies has, once again, received both top product and top publisher awards from ComponentSource. Partnered with LEAD since 1996, ComponentSource serves thousands of LEADTOOLS customers everywhere outside of North America. The awards given out by ComponentSource are based on sales from the previous year. This year, LEAD earned a spot in the top 25 for publishers and our Document Imaging SDK was found to be a top 100 product.

Publisher Award

• LEAD Technologies – Top 25 Publisher

Product Award

• LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDK – Top 100 Product

Support recently received a request for a simple C# sample that would

• detect a MICR in an image
• and return the MICR code as a string.

The protection of privacy is at the forefront of concerns for many organizations that need to distribute information. One way to do this is to redact private information from an image or document before releasing it. Recently we had a customer ask how to do this with LEADTOOLS.

Using LEADTOOLS, a user would load an image or a document as an image, use the redaction annotation object to "black-out" the text, and then burn the redaction into the image. Once the protected information is redacted, the image can then be saved as a text searchable PDF so the remaining text can be indexed or searched.

After reviewing the forums and responses to some surveys we recently send out, I noticed that many developers are looking for the best way to convert an image to a black & white PDF file. LEADTOOLS offers at least two solutions:

Continuing my adventure of "Going Paperless", I needed an easy way to encrypt PDF files before I added them to Evernote. To do this, I used the LEADTOOLS PDFFile() class to add a user password to a file. I created a console application with code to register itself into the Windows Explorer shell. Now I can right click any PDF file and encrypt it with a password. The LEADTOOLS code to do this is very easy; it took me longer to figure out how to edit the registry to add the application to the Windows Explorer context menu then it did to use LEADTOOLS to add the password.

One call got it done:

new PDFFile( fileName, password ) {
   SecurityOptions = new PDFSecurityOptions {
      UserPassword = newPassword,
      EncryptionMode = PDFEncryptionMode.RC128Bit
   },
   CompatibilityLevel = PDFCompatibilityLevel.PDF15
}.Convert( 1, -1, null );