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!

The countdown is on! The Microsoft Build virtual event will be held next week, May 25-27th. We look forward to hearing the latest in developer tools and techniques that Microsoft is sure to announce! Since we had such a great time last year recapping the event with @CSharpFritz, we’re doing it again! Join us on May 28th for a Build Wrap Up Show. During the show, we will recap all of the highlights from Microsoft Build, hear the latest and greatest from various Microsoft speakers, and - of course - you can enter to win awesome prizes!

It is tax season in the US. My CPA wants all of my supporting documentation to be saved as PDF, but I saved all as one multi-page TIFF when I scanned them. Fortunately, I have access to LEADTOOLS OCR.

In terms of functionality and platform support, LEADTOOLS OCR is the most flexible OCR engine available. It makes converting more than 200 image types to PDF and other document formats an easy task. The resulting PDF can be an image-based or text-searchable PDF. It can even be a combination of image over text so the resulting PDF has the text, but looks exactly like the TIFF.

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!