Visual Studio Magazine has published its annual Reader's Choice Awards and LEADTOOLS was once again declared a winner for the 11th straight year. The survey was conducted in August with nearly 500 readers casting their votes and giving their opinions about their favorite productivity enhancers. In 2013, over 400 products were in the running, and LEAD Technologies is proud to have emerged as a winner in three categories.

• Gold Medal in Component: Imaging, Image Processing & Drawing Tools —
  LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro
• Silver Medal in Component: Text, OCR, Scanning & Barcode —
  LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Suite
• Bronze Medal in Mobile Development Tools and Frameworks —
  Windows Phone SDK technology in LEADTOOLS Imaging Pro and above

To see the full article from Visual Studio Magazine, you can download the PDF from their website.

Want to hear a cool fact? LEADTOOLS Version 18 was released one year ago (January 30th, 2013). So to celebrate V18's first birthday, LEAD is giving you a present! Today we released a major update to LEADTOOLS Version 18, highlighted by many new features and enhancements to the entire Document, Medical, Multimedia and Imaging product lines.

There is a lot to be said about this release, so your best bet is to check out the press release or see a list of all the new features and enhancements. We hope you enjoy this update and join us in saying "happy birthday LEADTOOLS V18!"

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 Joe.

What is Does

This Objective-C project will process images using LEADTOOLS Version 18.

Have you ever been working on a zonal OCR project only to discover that the scanned documents were too different from the original document for OCR to be of any practical use? Some differences such as resolution and skew angle can be algorithmically corrected, but what if the zones themselves change in size? What if the data you want to capture is tabular in nature and has an unknown number of rows?

LEADTOOLS introduced its Invoice Recognition and Processing SDK technology in Version 19 to address this very problem. To learn more, check out our latest white paper which explains how to set up and use LEADTOOLS to recognize data from unstructured documents, invoices and more.

A new, major version of LEADTOOLS is right around the corner. Version 19 is packed full of incredible Document, Medical and Multimedia Imaging technology with many new features and enhancements across the board. Developers can do more than ever before with LEADTOOLS V19.

Document Imaging

• Document and image viewers for all platforms
  • New SVG engine for smooth scrolling and zooming of documents
  • Search text and use annotations on any format
  • Multi-page lazy loading for large documents
• Convert PDF & Office formats at 100% accuracy without the need for OCR
• Improved OCR accuracy for all languages including East Asian
• New barcode types: Aztec, MaxiCode & Micro QR
• Structured and unstructured forms recognition and processing with OEM-ready forms applications (checks, passports, driver licenses, invoices)
• PDF and Office format viewing, editing and conversion: convert hundreds of different file types to PDF, DOC/DOCX, RTF, HTML, XPS and more
• Powerful PDF SDK is feature packed and includes page manipulation, optimize PDF, bookmarks and metadata; create PDF/A files, PDF annotations, image extraction and more
• Zero-footprint HTML5/JavaScript UI controls & web services
• Image cleanup and pre-processing

Medical Imaging

• Comprehensive DICOM SDK supporting the latest specifications
• PACS client and server components
• Optional third-party cloud storage integration in the DICOM Storage Server
• New HL7 SDK with decoders, listener service and MWL integration
• Redesigned, highly customizable, cloud-enabled HTML5 / JavaScript zero-footprint medical viewer
• Rich Client Medical Web Viewer (IE only)
• Medical image processing
• Medical annotations and collaboration tools
• 3D volume construction and advanced visualization
• Specialized 8-16 bit grayscale image display
• OEM-ready applications with source code

Multimedia

• H.265 with 4K and 8K ultra-high-definition
• Capture, convert, stream and play audio and video
• Hundreds of formats and codecs for DirectShow and Media Foundation
  • MPEG-2 Transport Stream, H.264, MPEG-4 & more
• KLV metadata
• UAV and UAS
• Audio and video processing filters and transforms including overlays and motion detection
• DICOM reading and writing

Imaging

• Hundreds of file and image formats for loading, saving and compression
• Thousands of image processing algorithms
• New Image Viewer control for all platforms
• Scan with TWAIN from the web

More to come in the following weeks! Sign up for our newsletter to get all the latest information regarding LEADTOOLS Version 19 sent directly to your inbox.