This is the first project in a series of examples created by the LEADTOOLS Support Department. As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD's depth of features and ease of use. Today's project comes from Aaron.

What it Does

This C# console application monitors a directory and converts all the files pasted or dropped into the directory to searchable PDF files using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

Now that LEADTOOLS Version 19 has been released, we'll be using our white papers to dive into the new features in greater detail. This month's white paper is on the LEADTOOLS Document Converter and Document Viewer.

These exciting new frameworks will help developers create, read, and annotate raster and SVG images, annotations, thumbnails, text data and metadata from supported document types such as PDF, DOC, XLS, TIFF, JPEG and more. By using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as an intermediate format, the Document Viewer and Converter are able to work with any document, vector or raster image file format in a uniform fashion. Moreover, 100% accurate document-to-document conversion can be accomplished without the need for OCR.

We have continued our recent series of white papers on ways to use LEADTOOLS Document Imaging technology to conquer real-world application development scenarios. Today's white paper covers yet another aspect of Forms Recognition and shows how to use LEADTOOLS to aid in both the creation and processing of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) dominated forms.

If you have been keeping up with our white papers or are already familiar with LEADTOOLS Forms Recognition, you understand how master form templates are set up and lay a foundation for the rest of the forms recognition and processing workflow (if not, check out our previous white paper). When you look at a survey, bubble-sheet, or other type of scanned document which is chock-full of OMR fields it is quite intimidating due to how much time will likely need to be spent creating the master forms. Thankfully, the AutoZone method in LEADTOOLS OCR is able to detect OMR zones and therefore find and add all of the fields with just a few lines of code. Then after that, processing the forms and extracting the data is a breeze.

Annotation and Markup has been a staple feature in LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDKs for almost two decades. Over the years it has undergone several transformations, some cosmetic and some structural. LEADTOOLS Annotations, which started as a CDLL API, were also ported to new technologies as they came along: C++ Classes, .NET, WPF, Silverlight, HTML5 and more. Not only did we add new interfaces with the release of LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ in Version 18, but the Annotations library took on another big change that will not only future-proof the library, but also make cross-platform application development a breeze.

Compared to our current offering, the new annotations design and format in LEADTOOLS V18 most closely resembles the .NET interface. Developers using .NET, WPF, Silverlight, HTML5/JavaScript, WinRT, iOS, OS X and Android now share identical libraries. On top of the uniform programming interface design, the annotation file format which LEADTOOLS loads and saves has been standardized as well, allowing annotations to be loaded and saved in any LEADTOOLS application, regardless of its development platform.