In order to show off the new LEADTOOLS Anywhere ™ technology, LEAD recently published several free apps for WinRT on the Windows Store. Today, we are announcing three new Android apps approved for Google Play. Showing off nearly identical features as their WinRT siblings, these apps showcase not only the award-winning imaging technology for formats, image processing, OCR and Barcode, but show how easy it is to create native apps for multiple platforms with LEADTOOLS Anywhere™. The source code for each of these demos is available in the main LEADTOOLS evaluation to help get developers started on their LEADTOOLS Anywhere™ projects.

• LEADTOOLS Image Processing
• LEADTOOLS OCR Demo
• LEADTOOLS Barcode Demo
• LEADTOOLS DICOM Viewer Demo
• LEADTOOLS Medical Web Viewer Demo

We have more apps for iOS on the way and should hit the App Store any day now. If you're an Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod user, stay tuned for our next announcement for these exciting and free apps!

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.

PDF is by far one of the most widely used and adopted file formats in the world. However, support is lacking among most SDKs, which generally only implement basic loading as raster and saving searchable text with OCR. Since 17.5, LEADTOOLS has suppported advanced PDF capabilities such as extraction of text, hyperlinks, bookmarks and metadata as well as updating, splitting and merging pages from existing PDF documents. In version 18, the LEADTOOLS PDF SDK is even more powerful and comprehensive with its new and improved support for native PDF annotations and drawing markups.

Native annotations are an important feature in document imaging, as it allows users to communicate with each other by writing comments and drawing shapes on top of the document without making any permanent changes. Here are some of the most important PDF Annotations features in LEADTOOLS Version 18:

Our marketing department's media team has produced a new video highlighting the new and improved features within the LEADTOOLS OCR Engine in Version 18, including Faster Recognition, Zonal and Full Page Recognition, Image Over Text PDF, Tables and Cells, Dithered Text and Underlined Text Recognition. Take a couple minutes to learn about these exciting features, and we hope you enjoy the video!

We plan on releasing more videos just like this one covering other major feature sets like HTML5, PACS, DICOM, Barcode and more. As always, we welcome any feedback and would love to know what you think about our new videos, and/or let us know what you'd like to see next.

While making my rounds through the engineering department, the OCR team showed me some really impressive enhancements to the Advantage OCR engine coming soon. They've accomplished a lot, but my personal favorite is what they've done to the Advantage OCR engine's preprocessing algorithm. With much sweat, tears and coffee, they've fine-tuned the noise removal algorithm with impressive results. Other engines may have difficulty seeing between the lines (literally) when forms and documents use separator bars or boxes for individual characters. LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR Engine is doing a superb job at intelligently removing the noise and returning only the text of interest, rather than getting hung up on bars, dashes, speckles and other types of noise that should simply be ignored.

Other than the obvious benefit of improved accuracy, this is especially helpful for customers using forms recognition where character separators are prevalent. On documents where it might have been necessary to use a separate zone for each character and piece them together post-recognition, now only a single zone is needed since the separator bars and cells will no longer be taken into account.