If you haven't heard yet, LEADTOOLS Version 21 is coming soon! It might just be your first time visiting our blog if this is news to you because we've certainly been spilling the beans in excitement and anticipation. Today, we're going to tell you a little about what's ahead for our PDF SDK. In version 21, we have completely changed the way we load and render PDF files to be faster and use less memory, while providing better visual quality. Additionally, LEADTOOLS Version 21 will now load and process PDF Portfolios as well as attachments in PDF files.

PDFs are used virtually everywhere and by everyone these days. Throughout most organizations, PDF documents are vital to business applications and workflows. Many industries such as insurance agencies, financial institutions, and legal practices have standardized their document management systems on the PDF format due to the file format’s portability and versatility.

How these PDFs are being consumed depends on the type of PDF being dealt with. There are two main types of PDFs: image and searchable. For example, if you use a word processor to save the PDF, then that most likely will be a searchable PDF and you may copy/paste the text within the document as you please. On the other hand, if you use a scanner to convert paper to PDF, that most likely will be an image PDF and you will not be able to be able to search the text.

Even if you use a scanner to create an image PDF or were sent an image PDF by someone else, there still is a way to make it searchable. This happens through OCR and OCR is what LEADTOOLS does best! Developers are able to easily make automated OCR solutions and achieve these image to searchable PDF conversions with as little as five lines of code thanks to LEAD's powerful OCR libraries. These solutions are what save people and companies their two most valuable resources: time and money.

The other day, I received a PDF that was almost 50 pages long. After I received the PDF, it turns out that I only needed to keep 4 of those pages on file. Using the LEADTOOLS PDF SDK, I was able to add PDF extraction libraries and extract those 4 pages. This only took 10 lines of code to create while other APIs and libraries can take up to 40 lines of complex code.

LEADTOOLS will be presenting at the Solutions Showcase at AIIM this year. This will be the second year in a row that we have had the opportunity to present and demonstrate specific LEADTOOLS functionalities. With Version 21 on its way, we want to show off one of the newest additions to the SDK.

This showcase will focus on showing how to automatically redact values found by leveraging machine vision and key-value extraction. One goal we have with this feature is to show attendees how it can help transition offices to a paperless office and smooth out their day-to-day document needs. Powered by proprietary machine learning algorithms and the patented LEADTOOLS OCR Engine, this automatic redaction will work on all types of input documents, meaning there is no task this feature won’t be able to handle.

Following up on my last post, Convert an Image to Black & White PDF, I have updated the project to include a third method that converts document and vector formats to PDF. This conversion uses SVG as an intermediate format and does not require OCR, which results in perfect text accuracy.