One of the most foundational features in document imaging is image cleanup (also called preprocessing). When paper documents are scanned to digital form there are almost always imperfections. The paper can be at an angle, hole punches leave large black dots, folded paper introduces lines, and at the very least dust speckles litter small, dark dots throughout the image. All of these can have an adverse trickle-down effect on many other algorithms such as OCR, Forms, Barcode, Compression and more.

There is one caveat with most document imaging libraries: the document images must be black and white. While technically true for LEADTOOLS as well, it's not a limitation whatsoever. Each of the LEADTOOLS document cleanup functions return information on what it has done. For example, you can get the deskew angle, rectangle to crop, or region to fill and then apply those same operations on a color image:

This week I'd like to highlight another example project one of our support agents developed in response to a customer request. Group annotations are a necessary feature in any application utilizing annotations and markup. In fact, the LEADTOOLS HTML5 SDK includes support for group annotations out of the box by simply clicking and dragging with the select tool. However, this customer had a requirement to create and edit group annotations programmatically.

Here is how you create the annotations and then place them in groups. After that you can use the mouse to select, move and resize each group as if they were a single entity.

Most image viewing applications and controls are designed for viewing a single image at a time. However some images and documents, such as TIFF and PDF, have multiple pages. Since these documents are typically full of text, it is very natural to keep reading on to the next page without the need to press a button to load the next page. We have received several requests for this feature and one of our developer support agents has created an demo showing how to implement continuous multipage scrolling with our HTML5 viewer and RESTful Web Services.

The basic idea works similarly to an image slider or carousel you might see on a homepage. There is an outer container which, when scrolled to a specified location, will asynchronously create an additional HTML5 Viewer for the next page and allow you to keep scrolling until you have reached the end of the document. Below is the JavaScript snippet which modifies the DOM with jQuery and calls the LEADTOOLS Raster Web service to retrieve the image.