We have continued our recent series of white papers on ways to use LEADTOOLS Document Imaging technology to conquer real-world application development scenarios. Today's white paper covers yet another aspect of Forms Recognition and shows how to use LEADTOOLS to aid in both the creation and processing of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) dominated forms.

If you have been keeping up with our white papers or are already familiar with LEADTOOLS Forms Recognition, you understand how master form templates are set up and lay a foundation for the rest of the forms recognition and processing workflow (if not, check out our previous white paper). When you look at a survey, bubble-sheet, or other type of scanned document which is chock-full of OMR fields it is quite intimidating due to how much time will likely need to be spent creating the master forms. Thankfully, the AutoZone method in LEADTOOLS OCR is able to detect OMR zones and therefore find and add all of the fields with just a few lines of code. Then after that, processing the forms and extracting the data is a breeze.

Today we have released a new white paper which explains in great detail how to use our Forms Recognition and Processing to automatically classify a folder of documents. It describes a common problem where time and energy is lost through the organization of scanned or paperless bank statements, invoices and other documents, and how easy it is to solve it with LEADTOOLS. Our imaging SDKs are used in scenarios like this day in and day out, helping people and businesses be more efficient, organized and utilize their time on more enjoyable or productive tasks. It also offers several suggestions on how to enhance the basic application provided to achieve even greater things like cloud integration and large scale operations!

Automatically Classify Scanned Documents using LEADTOOLS Forms Recognition
Document imaging is certainly saving trees and physical storage space, but in some situations it fails to save much time or hassle. Opting in to paperless statements or manually scanning paper documents yourself is a great way to archive all of your bills, invoices, financial statements and the like. However, it still requires a fair amount of time and energy to thoughtfully organize the documents in your digital filing cabinet. Imagine being able to drop all of your scanned documents into a single folder and have all the work of moving and renaming the files in a logical, consistent manner done automatically. LEADTOOLS Forms Recognition and Processing fits the bill perfectly with its high level, flexible and powerful imaging libraries.

Some of you may have noticed already, but our web-based .NET documentation has gone through a major renovation and upgrade. Our documentation team has been collecting feedback and requests for a while and had a chance to start implementing the enhancements after Version 18 was completed. Some of it is cosmetic, but there are some pretty neat features and user interface updates that have greatly enhanced the webhelp. Here are a few of the major features added or enhanced in the new webhelp:

• New toolbar and TOC (Table of Contents) with larger, modern icons
• Visually pleasing keyword indexes
• Embedded chat page to facilitate communication with Support
• New search options
• Smarter and more efficient TOC
  • Dynamically generated TOC increases speed and navigability
  • Persistent state remembers which branches you have opened
  • Sync button highlights where your current article is located in the TOC

• Always visible direct link to the currently displayed article for easy sharing and bookmarking
• New option to email link to the current page
• Ability to show and hide the webframe
• New icons that show which platforms are supported by a function, property or event

We hope you find the documentation more thorough and easier to navigate, giving you more time where you need it most: in your code. As always, if there are any more features you would like to see, let us know!

Back by popular demand are LEAD white papers! There are many ways that we here at LEAD get the word out on how to use LEADTOOLS to create real-world solutions including this blog, CodeProject articles, support forums, code tips and the like. Lately we have had some requests for more in depth examples and solutions using LEADTOOLS which are best suited for a white paper format. So without further ado, here's a description of our first white paper in the upcoming series:

Using LEADTOOLS OCR to Enhance Google Drive Search
Google Drive is a wonderful service for storing, organizing and sharing files such as documents, photos and videos. However, TIFF and other raster image file formats can get easily lost because of the limited search capabilities. With LEADTOOLS, developers can use its OCR SDK to extract the text and then add it to the IndexableTextData for each item.

Annotation and Markup has been a staple feature in LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDKs for almost two decades. Over the years it has undergone several transformations, some cosmetic and some structural. LEADTOOLS Annotations, which started as a CDLL API, were also ported to new technologies as they came along: C++ Classes, .NET, WPF, Silverlight, HTML5 and more. Not only did we add new interfaces with the release of LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ in Version 18, but the Annotations library took on another big change that will not only future-proof the library, but also make cross-platform application development a breeze.

Compared to our current offering, the new annotations design and format in LEADTOOLS V18 most closely resembles the .NET interface. Developers using .NET, WPF, Silverlight, HTML5/JavaScript, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android now share identical libraries. On top of the uniform programming interface design, the annotation file format which LEADTOOLS loads and saves has been standardized as well, allowing annotations to be loaded and saved in any LEADTOOLS application, regardless of its development platform.