Whether you're creating contracts for business-to-business agreements or putting together a searchable PDF repository, finding a fast and efficient PDF viewer is critical. Tasks that are usually tedious and time-consuming with all the other PDF Viewers on the market (yes, even Adobe!) are easily automated using the LEADTOOLS Document Converter. This includes the ability to extract text using OCR, annotate, bookmark, and add searchability to PDFs- all without the need for any manual inputs!

Many developers building document viewing solutions often have to load and edit PDF form field data. For programmers who use the LEADTOOLS PDF SDK or the LEADTOOLS Document Viewer SDK this is an easy task! With minimal code, developers leveraging LEADTOOLS can easily provide users an interface to load and enter data into PDF form fields and then save the PDF.

When working in a paperless office, businesses receive hundreds of different forms and invoices from different vendors. It is often a major pain point and bottleneck to manually find, extract, and store all the necessary information. Thankfully with the LEADTOOLS Document SDK and our patented Forms Recognition technology, everything can be easily automated to improve workflow productivity and efficiency.

With LEADTOOLS, users need only to create templates, also known as master forms, for each of the different invoices or form types. These master forms are then stored in a repository and used to automatically recognize which type of filled form is currently being processed.

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.

We've been hinting at it for a while and the rumors are true: LEADTOOLS Version 18 (A.K.A LEADTOOLS Anywhere) will be released in January of 2013! I'd like to spend the next couple of weeks talking about what you'll see on the shelves come January.

This week I'm starting simple, and highlighting the changes to the product line. Overall, Version 18 is a slimmer offering in terms of actual products, but there are more features and development interfaces than ever before (which I'll cover next week)!