This month's white paper is an extremely practical one. In fact, we even had a few conversations with customers at last week's HIMSS conference about this very subject. Document archival has been around for quite a while now, but as archives grow and systems become more spread out and the client device ecosystem is much more diverse, standardizing your document archival system is becoming critical.

If you have need for end-to-end PDF and PDF/A functionality including OCR, Virtual Printing, HTML5 viewing and more, you will benefit greatly from our March white paper!

Annotation and Markup has been a staple feature in LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDKs for almost two decades. Over the years it has undergone several transformations, some cosmetic and some structural. LEADTOOLS Annotations, which started as a CDLL API, were also ported to new technologies as they came along: C++ Classes, .NET, WPF, Silverlight, HTML5 and more. Not only did we add new interfaces with the release of LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ in Version 18, but the Annotations library took on another big change that will not only future-proof the library, but also make cross-platform application development a breeze.

Compared to our current offering, the new annotations design and format in LEADTOOLS V18 most closely resembles the .NET interface. Developers using .NET, WPF, Silverlight, HTML5/JavaScript, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android now share identical libraries. On top of the uniform programming interface design, the annotation file format which LEADTOOLS loads and saves has been standardized as well, allowing annotations to be loaded and saved in any LEADTOOLS application, regardless of its development platform.

PDF is by far one of the most widely used and adopted file formats in the world. However, support is lacking among most SDKs, which generally only implement basic loading as raster and saving searchable text with OCR. Since 17.5, LEADTOOLS has suppported advanced PDF capabilities such as extraction of text, hyperlinks, bookmarks and metadata as well as updating, splitting and merging pages from existing PDF documents. In version 18, the LEADTOOLS PDF SDK is even more powerful and comprehensive with its new and improved support for native PDF annotations and drawing markups.

Native annotations are an important feature in document imaging, as it allows users to communicate with each other by writing comments and drawing shapes on top of the document without making any permanent changes. Here are some of the most important PDF Annotations features in LEADTOOLS Version 18: