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:

Our marketing department's media team has produced a new video highlighting the new and improved features within the LEADTOOLS OCR Engine in Version 18, including Faster Recognition, Zonal and Full Page Recognition, Image Over Text PDF, Tables and Cells, Dithered Text and Underlined Text Recognition. Take a couple minutes to learn about these exciting features, and we hope you enjoy the video!

We plan on releasing more videos just like this one covering other major feature sets like HTML5, PACS, DICOM, Barcode and more. As always, we welcome any feedback and would love to know what you think about our new videos, and/or let us know what you'd like to see next.

While making my rounds through the engineering department, the OCR team showed me some really impressive enhancements to the Advantage OCR engine coming soon. They've accomplished a lot, but my personal favorite is what they've done to the Advantage OCR engine's preprocessing algorithm. With much sweat, tears and coffee, they've fine-tuned the noise removal algorithm with impressive results. Other engines may have difficulty seeing between the lines (literally) when forms and documents use separator bars or boxes for individual characters. LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR Engine is doing a superb job at intelligently removing the noise and returning only the text of interest, rather than getting hung up on bars, dashes, speckles and other types of noise that should simply be ignored.

Other than the obvious benefit of improved accuracy, this is especially helpful for customers using forms recognition where character separators are prevalent. On documents where it might have been necessary to use a separate zone for each character and piece them together post-recognition, now only a single zone is needed since the separator bars and cells will no longer be taken into account.

We are very excited about the release of LEADTOOLS Anywhere™, and we've been inviting everyone to take advantage of our powerful multi-platform imaging technology by publishing free apps for WinRT, Android and today, iOS. Just like the WinRT and Android apps, these applications were fully approved for the App Store, and the source code for each of these demos is available in the main LEADTOOLS evaluation to help get developers started on their LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ projects.

• LEADTOOLS Image Processing
• LEADTOOLS OCR
• LEADTOOLS Barcode
• LEADTOOLS Medical Web Viewer

Now that LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ has successfully run the gauntlet for each app market for Windows, Android and Apple, developers using LEADTOOLS can rest easy knowing that one of the most crucial steps in their application development life-cycle has already been proven feasible, which is something not every third party SDK can guarantee.

With the recent release of Version 18, there is much to show off. I can't think of a better way than to dive into the new LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ libraries on The CodeProject. Check out our latest article in which we introduce Version 18 to The CodeProject community and show how to use OCR to extract text from an image on multiple platforms: .NET, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android.

Our existing .NET customers are already aware of how simple it is to OCR an image to searchable text in only a few lines of code, but did you know we brought that same programmer-friendliness to all of the new Anywhere™ platforms? One of the most impressive things about LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ is how hard our engineers worked to construct each development interface as similar as possible, making it easy to port your applications to multiple native platforms with less time and a greater ROI.