What's New in LEADTOOLS v20

New Platforms

Developers can now write a unified code base and simultaneously target even more platforms and devices falling under the ever-broadening .NET Standard umbrella. Click here to see a comparison chart of all the platforms LEADTOOLS supports.

• .NET Framework - Windows
• .NET Standard
  • .NET Core - Windows, Linux, and macOS
  • Xamarin - iOS, Android, and UWP
  • UWP (Universal Windows Platform)
• Java for macOS
• ARM Libraries for Linux

Azure Services

LEADTOOLS Version 20 includes new libraries to effortlessly create imaging and recognition cloud services that you can consume from your application. For more information, visit the Cloud Services page.

Recognition Engines

• Ported Forms Recognition to Java
• Speed and accuracy enhancements to LEAD OCR Engine (formerly Advantage Engine)
• Dramatically enhanced Forms, Barcode, and MICR accuracy and speed by up to 10x
• Added new Barcode pre-processing options to increase accuracy when recognizing bad-quality images
• CMC-7 MICR Font
  • Detect CMC-7 without a pre-defined region of interest
  • Find CMC-7 lines even in distorted images
• New OMR features and demo
  • New OMR features to help end-users define OMR forms
  • Answer Area and OMR Date fields for high-level OMR Forms Recognition
  • Enhanced checkbox detection algorithm to find more results in poor qulaity images

Document Viewer (HTML5/JavaScript)

• Increased speed and accuracy for internal SVG Engine
• Printing with DPI
• Printing Visible Area/Screenshot
• Added diskless mode that allows the viewer to securely load, save, cache, and convert documents and annotations without accessing the file system
• Import/Export IBM FileNet P8 and Daeja annotations to LEADTOOLS or PDF annotations
• Added true redaction for viewing and converting
• Added smart pagination
• Added PDF Fast Web View support
• Added initial viewing options
• Rotate and delete individual pages within a document
• Enhanced results when converting digital photos to PDF and other document formats
• Upgraded client-side rendering of PDF, HTML, PST, MSG, and EML formats
• Serverless mode for native JavaScript, client-side only rendering of multiple formats including PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and GIF
• Added POCO/POJO (Plain Old CLR/Java Object) support for communicating with the document service without requiring the full LEADTOOLS library
• Added Document History feature to track user changes for updating back-end system
• New non-blocking conversion option that allows monitoring long-running asynchronous jobs
• Mime type whitelist to control and restrict input document types
• Domain whitelist to speed up HTML rendering and conversion within enterprise environments
• Push and Pull annotations and documents to and from the cache for back-end loading and saving of documents
• Enhanced metadata information for cached documents
• Document Service logging interface to improve system health and performance by identifying bottlenecks and simplifying intelligent horizontal scaling
• Easily switch between caching systems and rendering engines with configuration file settings
• Added multitenancy support for document service

LEADVIEW API (HTML5/JavaScript)

We are very excited to announce LEAD's next milestone of web-based and JavaScript document viewing technology. The LEADTOOLS Document Viewer web application and service have been packaged into the LEADVIEW API component. This component requires as little as three lines of code to plug into any JavaScript application. Further, features have been included to make the UI easy to customize. The LEADVIEW API supports all features of the existing HTML5/JavaScript Document Viewer, including viewing and converting hundreds of file formats plus more than 30 annotation and markup objects. Users can easily create themes for the UI or use the predefined dark or light themes. With a settings dialog or JSON file, the entire ReactJS UI can be customized by each end-user or administratively locked down at a server level.

Optical Mark Recognition

• New OMR Forms libraries and demo designed for processing large test sheets and surveys
• Rapidly define master form templates by clicking and dragging over large multiple-choice bubble groups
• Evaluate filled forms against optional answer key to provide detailed statistics and grading

Document Formats

• Added full support for charts and shapes to all Office formats
• Reduced PDF output file size
• Added PDF Linearization for all platforms
• Image interpolation for images inside PDF documents
• Extended support for additional PDF annotations, including note reply, leader, line endings, redaction, and text callout
• Added new PDF Annotation style options including border effects and cloud stroke
• Enhanced writing and font embedding support for PDF/A
• Save PDF/A-2b with JPEG 2000 compression
• Use near-lossless JBIG2 compression for smaller PDF file sizes
• Speed improvements for Document Converter
• Detect font styles, including underline and strike-through, when converting PDF to SVG
• Optimized loading speed for XLSX and multipage Word DOC/DOCX files
• Custom margins for XLSX and RTF
• Scatter chart rendering support in XLSX files
• Added options for choosing the page size and order when rasterizing and splitting large spreadsheets into multiple pages
• New multi-platform RTF engine with improved rendering and speed
• Improved matching of original document when writing text with a dark/light background
• Multi-platform support for Office, PST, MSG, and EML formats
• Added 3JS (three.js) and STL format support
• New Initial View options for controlling loading page and view mode

Virtual Printer

• Improved print jobs management
• Faster printing/spooling when printing multiple simultaneous jobs
• Lower memory consumption

New Image Processing Functions

• Detect Document
• Detect Business Card
• Detect MICR zone

Additional updates to the Document Engine

• Load and Save IBM FileNet P8 and Daeja annotations, converting them to/from LEADTOOLS or PDF annotations
• Redesigned the WPF ImageViewer to include multiple items, SVG rendering, and User-defined XAML Content
• Load EMF and EMF+ files as SVG
• Improvements performance of blank page detection for pages with noise, lines, header, and footer
• Up to 200% faster Deskew on 1 and 8-bit images
• Freehand Annotation Selection Tool
• Speed improvements to Median filter
• Speed optimizations of 30% for loading document and vector files formats
• Updated HTML filters for Linuc and MacOS to use WebKit
• Added Linux and MacOS filters for DOC, XLS, and PPT

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Engine.

Medical Web Viewer

• Improved UI with support for multiple themes (light and dark)
• Template Editor enhancements to simplify copying and changing existing templates
• Choose between new ASP.NET Web API services or existing WCF Services
• Specify the instance to be displayed when using an External Controller
• Improved scrolling speed
• Added a new overlay option that covers the entire series
• SVG waveform rendering
• Customizable magnify glass that can zoom in or out with the mouse wheel
• Enhanced image export privacy
• Added support for long user names and domain logins

Zero-Footprint 3D Volume Rendering

• Client-side display and control communicates rapidly with server-side 3D rendering engine for unparalleled medical 3D display in any modern browser
• Multiple volume types including VRT, MIP, MPR, SSD)
• Interactive controls for window level, density removal, offset, scale, zoom, and more
• Settings and options for customizing the volume appearance including border, rotation cube, resolution, and slicing
• Cache 3D volume for faster load times

Hanging Protocols

• Linked CINE
• Enhanced loading times
• Support for irregular layouts

DICOM Storage Server

• Added full Role Selection support (None, SCU only, SCP only, and SCU and SCP)
• New options for generating, saving, and deleting DICOM metadata (XML or JSON) containing all DICOM elements and values
• Easily manage large numbers of clients (10,000 or more) with new search/paging options in Client Configuration Dialog
• Added support for long user names and domain logins

DICOM Communication

• Added support for a more secure encryption for DICOM Communication, recommended by the DICOM Standard 2018b part 15 (BCP195 TLS Secure Transport Connection Profile), along with support for the corresponding recommended TLS 1.2 cipher suites
• Added new events to the DICOM High-level SCU and SCP toolkit that allows programmers to easily customize the DICOM High-level toolkit behavior
• Enhancements to high-level C-FIND and C-GET methods
• Improved speed and efficiency when storing and retrieving large DICOM data sets

DICOM Data Set

• Added support for latest DICOM Value Representations
• Updated support for DICOM Role Selection

Additional updates to the Medical Engine

• Added DICOM Support for iOS/macOS
• Modality Worklist Find enhancements
• Patient Updater enhancements
• DICOM Communication enhancements to enable/disable group lengths with standard data elements
• New diagnostic tools and improved logging for DICOM Storage Server
• Enhanced DICOM support for character sets
• Increased speed for creating, loading, and saving DICOMDIR

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging Engine.

New Image Processing Functions

• Wiener Filter
• Edge Enhancement

New Image Viewer and Camera Controls for Xamarin

• Camera Control for Xamarin
  • One programmer-friendly code base for all Xamarin platforms eliminates need for writing native code
  • Auto-focus and touch-to-focus
  • Flash and Torch controls
  • HD Video recording
  • Access live camera feed to implement advanced LEADTOOLS features including Barcode, OCR, and Image Processing
• Image Viewer Control for Xamarin
  • For iOS, Android, and UWP

Additional updates to the Imaging Engine

• New mechanisms for controlling how and where temp files are used including memory-only mode for secure applications that restrict disk access
• Background color detection in document images
• Image Stitching and scrolling for image viewers
• Added support for saving 8-bit color images with lossless JP2 or JPX formats
• D2D Drawing surface for WPF controls
• Mouse Wheel Zoom support for Magnifying Glass
• AFP file format on Linux

Click here for more information on all features within the LEADTOOLS Imaging Engine.

In Version 20, the OCR engines and respective add-ons were renamed.

LEAD Engine (previously Advantage Engine)

• LEADTOOLS OCR Module - LEAD Engine

If you have any questions about the new product line or are upgrading from a previous LEADTOOLS version, please contact sales@leadtools.com

LEAD Technologies is continually making improvements and adding new features to Version 20. To see how it has evolved and read about each individual release, check out the press releases below:

• LEAD Releases Innovative Document and Medical Imaging Technologies (March 13, 2019)
• LEADTOOLS Extends HTML5/JavaScript Document Viewer for Enterprise Environments (June 19, 2018)
• LEAD Technologies Releases LEADTOOLS Version 20 (January 30, 2018)