Digital images are everywhere you look. There's no escaping them. They can be found in just about every email, they're all over social media, and they can be embedded throughout PDFs. Some may embed images into PDFs to make the document look better or to provide visuals. Others may do this to show images for legal reasons, such as insurance adjusters.

Continuing off of my previous blog post about using LEADTOOLS OCR to save screenshots as searchable PDFs, this post demonstrates how to extract the text from those screenshots and store it back into your clipboard as plain text.

Like I said on the last blog post, developers can get images that have been copied to the clipboard using .NETs Clipboard Class. Instead of saving screenshots as searchable PDFs, this time we'll be using the GetText Method to retrieve text so we can store it back in the clipboard.

After reviewing the forums and responses to some surveys we recently send out, I noticed that many developers are looking for the best way to convert an image to a black & white PDF file. LEADTOOLS offers at least two solutions:

Continuing my adventure of "Going Paperless", I needed an easy way to encrypt PDF files before I added them to Evernote. To do this, I used the LEADTOOLS PDFFile() class to add a user password to a file. I created a console application with code to register itself into the Windows Explorer shell. Now I can right click any PDF file and encrypt it with a password. The LEADTOOLS code to do this is very easy; it took me longer to figure out how to edit the registry to add the application to the Windows Explorer context menu then it did to use LEADTOOLS to add the password.

One call got it done:

new PDFFile( fileName, password ) {
   SecurityOptions = new PDFSecurityOptions {
      UserPassword = newPassword,
      EncryptionMode = PDFEncryptionMode.RC128Bit
   },
   CompatibilityLevel = PDFCompatibilityLevel.PDF15
}.Convert( 1, -1, null );

Even today there are many organizations that rely on fax as a required form of communications. Because of this, receiving faxes is a requirement that much still be met. To do this, many organizations utilize fax services either hosted locally or by a third-party. Many of these services will email received faxes to users as a PDF file.

In a normal facsimile transmission, every other scan-line is skipped. This reduces the amount of data that needs to be sent over the relatively slow connection used to send faxes. To account for the missing scan-lines, the aspect ratio of the pixels is 2:1. It is important to recognize this when displaying the image else you will end up displaying the image incorrectly, making it looked squashed.