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.

I heard some exciting news from engineering today in regards to our WinRT barcode engine. Just over a month has passed since we released the WinRT SDK, and our hardworking document imaging experts have already revamped the barcode recognition algorithm in several key ways:

• Enhanced the barcode engine to produce optimum results in pictures taken from mobile devices
• New image preprocessing that resolves extreme shadows, lighting and 3D perspective skewing in images capture from cameras
• Faster recognition when reading barcodes from a video stream
• Enhanced internal binarization for color images and videos

All of these add up to superior accuracy and speed to what was already an outstanding product! To be more precise, the new algorithm is presented as a setting which means this has no impact on the previous algorithm if you are still using our barcode engine on scanned documents. These updates, as well as a free demo for the Windows Store, should be available shortly after the holidays!