While we can talk all day about how great LEADTOOLS is, it's always meaningful to hear a review from an outside developer. Today, we're sharing with you a review of our LEADTOOLS OCR Module - LEAD Engine written by Jeffrey T. Fritz

I live in an older house that loves to bother me with the joys of home ownership and maintenance. Plumbing issues, strange electrical installation choices, and a 30-year-old furnace that burns oil. At first, the oil burner wasn’t a big deal because this meant I wasn’t paying for an electric heater. However, it did mean that my basement had a huge oil tank hiding in it that would need to be refilled on a regular basis during the cold winters. That shouldn’t be a problem... but I would never know the level of the oil in the tank unless I wandered down to the basement on a regular basis and checked the level by reading an old gauge mounted on the top of the tank.

As a technologist, this daily task of reading the oil tank gauge became tiresome and I had no way to know how quickly I was burning oil. What is the correlation between average daily temperature and the amount of oil my furnace burns? I wanted to solve the problem and started with a pad of paper and wrote down the daily readings. BORING! Who wants to read hard copy? I want this data on my phone, and I want to be collected without my daily trip to the basement to read the meter.

As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD's depth of features and ease of use. Today's project comes from Faris.

What it Does

This C# console application will scan a page, extract text with OCR and save to PDF using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

We take great pride in the fact that LEADTOOLS is truly a comprehensive imaging SDK. We developed LEADTOOLS with the mindset that we want it to be a one-stop-shop for imaging. There are many applications, especially in the document imaging world, where technologies intersect and you may find the need to piecemeal multiple SDKs together. For example, Scanning + Document Cleanup + OCR, OMR + Forms Recognition + OCR, or OCR + PDF. How about something a little less common, like OCR + Barcode?

This video showcases how you can use the LEADTOOLS .NET Core libraries to build a cross-platform OCR Application. This sample application loads a sample image such as a TIF, performs OCR on the text, and outputs the recognized words into a PDF document.

For the source code for this project please visit our support forum: http://bit.ly/NETCoreOCR

We were recently put in contact with an experienced technical blogger and web developer, Dick Strauss, about exploring the possibility of conducting a product review. He found our product line interesting and something his readers might benefit from. We were happy to partner up with him and gave him a development license for one of our most popular products, LEADTOOLS Recognition.

Not only did he navigate our documentation and rapidly implement both full-page and zonal OCR with little effort, but he found that LEADTOOLS was, in his opinion, a "stunning product" rather than just a "good functional product." He experienced the entire process of using LEADTOOLS, including unlocking support with his development license, starting a project from scratch, and firing off some questions to our outstanding support department.