HTML5 is certainly the way of the future, but as many web developers know, adoption can be slow. In many cases, older browsers such as IE8 is still in use enterprise-wide and a lightweight, feature packed solution is still required. LEADTOOLS pioneered lightweight ASP.NET Web Forms imaging years ago and is still a popular choice. Though not as flashy and responsive as HTML5, the heavy-lifting jobs such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) are still done on the server side.

In the following example, you'll see how to add OCR functionality and image display into your ASP.NET Web Forms application.

The cause of a System.BadImageFormatException is a common question received by our developer support department. At first glance, some LEADTOOLS users think the BadImageFormatException is a LEADTOOLS specific exception because LEADTOOLS is an imaging SDK and "Image" is in the name of the exception. However, the exception has nothing to do with LEADTOOLS being an imaging SDK.

This exception is thrown when a process tries to load an assembly that is built for an incompatible architecture. The MSDN description of the exception is:

Blank page detection is an important step in most document imaging workflows. For example, it can be used to help end-users make sure they have their paper facing the correct way and inform them when they've done something wrong. For a more automated solution, blank pages can be removed to save on disk space and bandwidth.

However, the difficulty with blank page detection is that it can be a bit subjective. Humans can quickly perceive a blank page because we see that the page doesn't have any text on it. But what does a computer do with a text-less page with lines, noise, borders and the like?

Saving the settings of your TWAIN device is a very important feature which is fully supported by LEADTOOLS. For the end-user, it allows them to load and save different scanning profiles and options they use on a regular basis such as "high resolution color photo", "medium quality black and white document", or "auto-cropped receipt". One caveat to this feature is that it saves all of the settings, which comes with a few downsides:

1. Large template files
2. Longer execution time
3. Most importantly...That template file will only work on one scanner

To alleviate these problems, LEADTOOLS now has a new overload for its TwainSession.SaveTemplateFile function which allows you to save a subset of settings rather than the entire collection. As long as you are saving core, mandatory settings that are supported by all TWAIN scanners, you can use these templates regardless of the hardware device being used!

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: