Tonal range is an important attribute of an image, especially photographs, when trying to improve OCR results. Tonal range is the range of tones between the lightest and darkest areas of an image and is also known as contrast. An image with a wide range has both very dark (black) and very light (white) elements. An image with a narrow range is more limited in its tonal scope, which is usually in the mid-ranges (varying shades of grays).

LEAD Technologies has joined the TWAIN Working Group as an Associate Member. For many years, LEAD has included imaging toolkits that follow the TWAIN standards and this membership helps ensure an even higher level of support and a commitment to future development. More specifically, LEAD's membership in the TWAIN Working Group paves the way for early development access to the new TWAIN Direct standard, enabling imaging workflow applications for the desktop, mobile, or in the cloud.

To learn more, read the full press release.

There are still over two million desktop application developers—i.e., currently writing or maintaining Windows desktop apps, whether written in C++ or .NET. Regardless of your targeted platform and environment, be it Winforms and C#, or WPF or UWP, Visual Studio is the IDE of choice. VS Code is gaining popularity, and our devs use it for some projects, but VS is the bread and butter around here.

One the thing that makes VS2017 such an amazing IDE is its extensibility, allowing a vast ecosystem of add-ins to flourish. You can find them in the Visual Studio Marketplace, or by searching from inside VS: Just go to Tools -> Extensions and Updates... and select the "Online" option:

Today, LEADTOOLS released an update to its Multimedia SDKs that enhances support for several formats and streaming capabilities. These improvements are all geared towards extending our support for various technologies as they emerge on the market, and in speeding up the overall process of streaming audio and video data to clients.

• Added support for h.265 and h.264 hardware encoders to MP4 and MKV outputs
• Added support for MP3 audio to MP4 and MKV outputs
• Added support for MPEG-2 audio encoder to MKV output
• Improved capture device support
• Added the ability to use Microsoft RTSP media source using windows media extensions, with implementation of network source authentication interfaces

This update is freely available to any existing LEADTOOLS Version 20 customers and is included in the latest Multimedia SDK download.

UPDATE

While most features in LEADTOOLS are backwards-compatible and older how-tos still apply in newer versions, the features discussed in this post have changed significantly in Version 20. Please refer to the following forum post for an updated version of this tutorial:

https://www.leadtools.com/support/forum/posts/t12633-HOW-TO--Enable-HTTPS-in-the-LEADTOOLS-Web-Scanning-Host