Leadtools.Windows.Annotations Introduction

The Leadtools.Windows.Annotations namespace adds powerful annotation capabilities to documents and images in your Silverlight and WPF projects. These include not only lines, shapes, and pointers, but essential tools like redaction (blackout), hotspots, text, images, highlights, sticky notes, audio, stamps, rulers and hyperlinks.

LEADTOOLS Annotation (image markup) Options can be added to medical, grayscale and color images. They are included with LEADTOOLS Medical and Document SDKs.

Annotation objects available include Ruler, Protractor, Cross Product, Pointer, Text, Circles, Freehand, etc. LEADTOOLS allows you to read or write annotations as an external annotation file, private DICOM data elements or LEAD or Wang annotation tags within a TIFF file, or annotations can become a permanent part of the image data or applied to a 1-bit image to create an overlay. With LEADTOOLS Annotations, you can choose between low level access to the annotations, or you can implement annotation support through a fully automated mode with a ready to use floating, customizable toolbar and pop-up menus. The superior annotation features provided in LEADTOOLS can be used in any application where image markup is desired.

LEADTOOLS allows the end-user to reposition nodes of an existing freehand object, which prevents the user from having to redraw the object. Enhanced redact objects allow you to restore parts of an image that were blacked out. When combined with annotation security, these redact objects provide a means of granting user-level access to parts of an image. Annotation objects can be stored as a separate object layer, or can be burned or embedded into the actual image. LEADTOOLS allows you to read or write annotations as an external file or as LEAD or Wang annotation tags within a TIFF file. With LEADTOOLS, you can choose between low level access to the annotations, or you can implement annotation support through a fully automated mode with a ready to use floating, customizable toolbar and pop-up menus. The superior annotation features provided in LEADTOOLS can be used in any application where image markup is required.

Annotations are based on vectored drawing functions and are associated with bitmaps as an overlay of the displayed image. LEADTOOLS supports a number of annotation types, including lines, rectangles, audio clips, hotspots, redact objects, polygons, and containers. A container is a specialized annotation object that lets you position and group other annotation objects, including other container objects. For a full list of available annotation types, refer to Classes.

LEADTOOLS maintains annotations separately from bitmaps. Your application code is responsible for maintaining the relationships between images and annotations. For example, the annotation example that ships with LEADTOOLS, creates an annotation file that has the same name as its associated image file, but with a different extension. When the image file is loaded, the program looks for an associated annotation file and loads it as well.

The functions supported by LEADTOOLS let you create automated annotations or non-automated annotations, depending on your application’s requirements.