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!

UPDATE

While most features in LEADTOOLS are backwards-compatible and older how-tos still apply in newer versions, the features discussed in this post have changed significantly in Version 20. Please refer to the following forum post for an updated version of this tutorial:

https://www.leadtools.com/support/forum/posts/t12633-HOW-TO--Enable-HTTPS-in-the-LEADTOOLS-Web-Scanning-Host

A few weeks ago, I was asked to help technical support with a new feature we are adding to our Media Streaming Server. Our developers added SSL to the Media Streaming Server, and technical support needed some SSL certificates for development and testing before we release it in mid-February.

Some years ago, I worked in the IT department, and I never delete anything. I just happened to have a few scripts that could help them streamline self-signed certificate creation.

To close out LEAD's 2014 event calendar, we will once again be exhibiting at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) Annual Meeting in Chicago. This year's meeting is bound to be a historic event celebrating RSNA's 100th year. If you are a software developer, IT admin, system integrator or radiologist this is an event you don't want to miss. LEAD will be showing off its full line of medical imaging technology with high-level SDKs and OEM-ready solutions for DICOM, PACS, HL7, 3D Volume Rendering, Zero-footprint HTML5 viewers, and more

New features coming soon in Version 19

In addition to showcasing our current offering of award-winning medical imaging toolkits, we will be providing demonstrations of our soon-to-be-released LEADTOOLS Version 19. This new version will include new features spanning across both document and medical imaging. Major new version 19 features include:

The new Microsoft enterprise tech conference, Microsoft Ignite, is bringing together the best of their past individual events — the Management Summit and Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and TechEd conferences — for a single, tech-fueled conference with better content and connections than ever before. LEAD Technologies is excited to be a part of this brand-new show and will have LEADTOOLS Version 19 on full display. LEAD's world-class imaging technologies help developers create applications for many of the conference's themes and talking points including cloud infrastructure, big data, mobility and more.

• HTML5 / JavaScript Viewers
• Web Scanning with TWAIN
• Web Services
• Distributed Processing
• Document Converter
• Document Viewer
• OCR
• Barcode
• Forms Recognition and Processing
• DICOM
• PACS
• HL7
• Multimedia

Visit LEAD Technologies at Microsoft Ignite and win a $500 Amazon Gift Card

In addition to these features, LEADTOOLS will have much more on display at Ignite. While you are in Chicago, we hope you take the time to visit our booth and check out the latest document, medical and multimedia imaging technology LEADTOOLS has to offer. Oh, and we're also giving away a $500 Amazon gift card to two lucky attendees who stop by!