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!

Some things you just have to see to believe, and we think that LEADTOOLS V19's new Invoice Recognition and Processing SDK is one of them. Now you can in our latest YouTube video!

If you have any familiarity with Forms Recognition and/or OCR, you may understand that those technologies typically rely on the master template and the document you wish to recognize having the same layout and proportions. Tax forms and applications fit this nicely since as long as the documents can get cleaned up and aligned, the zones and fields on the form to recognize will easily be found. Invoices, bills and other unstructured documents need special processing which LEADTOOLS masterfully developed and exposed in this new programmer-friendly toolkit. We hope you enjoy the video!

Automate your data entry problems away with a state-of-the-art forms processing API. Whether you're working with customer surveys, tax documents, or billing records every industry uses forms daily to conduct business. Moving data from a paper to a digital medium can be a time consuming hassle. That's why LEADTOOLS has developed exclusive capabilities that extract text from images containing any combination of machine-printed text, handwritten text, MICR, MRZ, and OMR fields. LEADTOOLS will automatically detect and recognize everything! Below are the main steps to quickly and accurately process various form types regardless of how the data is formatted.

The LEADTOOLS Document Analyzer is an innovative new library that intelligently finds and acts upon information in unstructured documents and images. The Document Analyzer handles what was once mundane and tedious manual work as it automatically sifts through data to find information of interest. Once a piece of information is found, an action such as highlight, redact, or extract can be applied. You will see below that the use cases of the Document Analyzer are widespread and varied, but all save time, reduce error, and improve the customer’s experience.