The LEADTOOLS Document Converter allows you to convert files between any of 150+ file formats that the LEADTOOLS SDK supports. (Yes, you read that right. Our toolkit offers unparalleled format support). With the use of Intelligent OCR (where the LEAD OCR engine is only used when needed), you can easily convert images to documents, documents to images, images to images, and documents to documents; all using the same code.

LEADTOOLS Version 19 is here! It is one of the most highly-anticipated and feature-packed releases ever. LEAD Technologies is once again raising the bar with unique and innovative imaging technologies, frameworks and solutions, and continues to prove why they are The World Leader in Imaging SDKs.

Since there are so many new features in this new release, we will highlight the new and improved technologies in each engine over the next few days. Today, we will be starting with the Document Imaging SDK Technology in LEADTOOLS, which is headlined by the new Document Viewer and Document Converter frameworks for .NET and HTML5/JavaScript.

Today, we are happy to announce a major update to LEADTOOLS Version 19. Special focus was given to the LEADTOOLS Document and Medical Imaging engines, each of which we will cover in a blog post.

First up, let's take a look at what's new in the Document Imaging Engine:

OCR

• Faster deskew on high resolution (600DPI and greater) images
• Memory optimizations for auto zoning algorithm (up to 60%)
• Improved paragraph, font and zone detection
• Support for vertical text zones
• Detect vertical and horizontal table cell direction
• Text Book option which enhances graphic zone detection through cleaning of noisy texts
• Memory and speed enhancements for Advantage OCR engine's Native spell checker
• Native x64 support for Professional OCR engine
• Rotation angle support for all engines

Forms

• Improved invoice recognition accuracy

Documents SDK

• Convert and Save documents with the zero-footprint HTML5 Document Viewer
• Faster SVG and raster image rendering, thumbnail generation and bookmark extraction in Document Viewer
• Faster OCR and SVG conversion using multi-threading in the Document Converter
• Support for ZIP compression in the Document Converter
• Enhanced output for PDF and Word
• Support for vertical text zones
• SVG viewing and conversion support for HTML, RTF and TEXT
• DOCX and PPTX support for Windows Phone 8.1

Annotations

• Faster DirectX rendering engine for WPF and WinRT
• Fill objects with linear gradient brush
• Improved clip drawing for objects outside container bounds
• Draw and edit annotations at the same time
• Drag and drop for multiple containers
• Pan and zoom objects while they are still selected
• Select objects using extended key
• Advanced text editor for HTML5 annotations
• RenderedObjectBounds property for calculating real bounds

Barcode

• Perspective correction for PDF417 barcode
• More accurate detection for corrupted barcodes
• Improved detection of small 1D linear barcodes

Formats

• XMP metadata
• Read metadata from Office and vector formats

Web Scanning

• Send and receive user data to scanning service and upload server
• Customization options for scanning service

Stay tuned to see a list of new features and updates to our Medical Imaging SDKs. To read more about this exciting update, see the official press release!

You might have heard about how LEAD has a world-class Document Converter. Our Document Converter can easily transform HTML to PDF. The portability of a PDF allows you to access content from webpages across multiple devices both on- and off-line.

Below are a few code snippets to convert HTML to PDF.

We recently posted “Convert PDF to TXT in C#, VB, and Java” that uses the LEADTOOLS Document Converter class. Now, we are going to go the other way around and convert TXT to PDF. The main difference is that conversion from text to PDF is less complicated because the source TXT file is always text based. On the other hand, PDF files can be text or image based. Converting an image to text requires OCR. Converting Text to PDF does not matter if the resulting PDF is image- or text-based.