LEADTOOLS Document Suite SDK v21

New in the LEADTOOLS Recognition Engine

• New Document Analyzer SDK
  • The Document Analyzer SDK intelligently and automatically extracts data from text-based Microsoft Office documents (DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLX), PDFs, and document images (JPG, TIFF, PNG PDF) without requiring a structured layout
    • Automatically extracts data from images, documents, mixture of images and documents, and from images within documents.
    • Flawlessly handles various data formats, including tables, text flows, data across multiple lines.
    • Includes predefined rulesets and functions to add custom rulesets to find, collect, and act upon information.
    • Performs deep analysis to ensure that information of interest is not missed.
    • Customizable actions include collect, report, highlight, and redact.
• New ICR
  • New ICR technology for remarkable unstructured handwritten print and cursive text recognition
    • Support for hand-printed and cursive handwriting.
    • Support for the English character set, including uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation, and symbols.
    • Powerful and automatic preprocessing to handle noisy and low-resolution images.
    • Spelling dictionaries.
    • Process color and bitonal images.
    • Output strings or text-based formats such as PDF, DOCX, and XML.
    • Comprehensive reports for text results:
      • Character size, location, and baseline.
      • Positional attributes, including end of word, end of line, and end of paragraph.
      • Confidence values.
• Mixed Zone Recognition
  • New mixed mode AutoZone capabilities that combine LEADTOOLS OCR, ICR, and Recognition technologies to automatically detect, recognize, and extract everything within an image.
    • Automatically extract text from images that contain a mix of machine-printed text, handwritten text, MICR, MRZ, OMR, graphics, and table zones.
• OCR
  • Performs deep analysis to ensure that targeted information is not missed in recognition.
  • Superscript and subscript support.
  • Automatic detection of E13-B and CMC7 MICR zones.
  • Major enhancement to OCR speed, recognition, and accuracy.
  • Detect text in graphics and image zones.
  • Detect MRZ code orientation.
  • Better OCR recognition for images taken by mobile.
  • Detect slope for each word to produce better output.
  • Enhanced mono- and proportional-font recognition.
  • LEAD OCR engine startup optimization.

New in LEADTOOLS Document Engine

Document Framework

• Document Viewer
  • New Document Viewer Component for Xamarin Forms.
  • Added support to load and play any of LEAD's supported video formats in the .NET and Java Document Viewer (Microsoft Windows only).
  • Client-side PDF rendering enhancements include:
    • Stamp rendering.
    • Memory optimization.
    • Render digital signatures.
    • Switch to service mode based on individual page size or image encoding.
    • Speedup for calRGB/grayscale color space rendering.
  • Customize text in thumbnails.
  • Added support for history (previous/next document).
  • Improved UI responsiveness when viewing documents with many pages.
  • Added custom UI injection and binding support to the high-level ReactJS document viewer control, LEADVIEW.
• Attachments
  • Added support for general purpose and PDF attachments.
  • Added support for PDF Embedded files and Portfolio.
• Document Service
  • Added support to load a mix of different annotations formats, including IBM P8/Deja annotations.
• Hybrid Caching
  • Use rules to mix different cache back ends. For example, smaller items use in-memory cache and large items use a remote cache.

New Document and Image Compare Libraries

• Compares two documents or pages and intelligently highlights changes, additions, and deletions.
  • Text compare.
  • Bitmap compare.

Document Converter

• Document Converter optimizations to speed up text extraction.

PDF SDK Updates

• PDF Loading and Rendering
  • Redesigned PDF loading and rendering to significantly optimize memory usage, load time, and render quality, with smooth zooming and no pixelation.
  • Optimized memory usage, load time, and render quality.
  • Optimized functions that control PDF metadata to be faster.
  • Functionality added to load and render only a portion of a PDF document.
  • Rasterization of documents at 2400 DPI.
  • Added "Enhance Thin Lines" rendering feature to clarify thin lines in the viewer.
• PDF Portfolio and PDF Attachment
  • Load PDF Portfolio documents.
  • Load portfolio schema.
  • Extract files within PDF Portfolio documents.
  • Load PDF document with embedded attachments.
  • Extract embedded attachments from PDF documents.
• PDF Redaction Updates
  • Added support for image redaction.
  • Updated text redaction to support text inside Form XObject.
• Additional PDF Updates
  • Load PDF forms.
  • Enhanced PDF annotations (create, modify, load and save).
  • Enhanced PDF manipulation operations such as PDF merge, insert, and extract pages.
  • Enhanced the PDF Optimizer.
  • Enhanced PDF/A conversion with focus on font handling.

Updates for Microsoft Office Formats

• Added support to render many chart types, including:
  • Radar.
  • Area.
  • Scattered.
  • Line.
  • Bar.
  • Chart legends.
• Enhanced support for vector graphics rendering in all Microsoft Office formats.
• Enhanced SVG text rendering and extraction.
• Optimize speed and memory usage for all document formats: DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, and PPTX.
• DOC/DOCX
  • Mathematical equation model (OMML) support in DOCX only.
  • Optimized load speed and memory usage.
  • Added support for equation formula calculations.
  • Sections and Drawing-ML shapes.
  • Enhanced support for rendering nested tables.
  • Enhanced text wrapping around text boxes.
• XLS/XLSX
  • Optimized speed and memory usage.
  • Faster loading for large sheets.
  • Formula evaluator module to handle all logical operations and calculations for conditional formatting.
  • Table design support.

New in the LEADTOOLS Multimedia Engine

• Multimedia SDK Updates
  • Faster ISO format capture and conversion.
  • New live audio processor to detect and fill dropped audio samples.
• Updates to Streaming SDK
  • MPEG-2 transport error detection option added to the LEAD MPEG-2 Transport Multiplexer.
  • Streaming server can use MPEG-2 Transport files for all protocols.
  • Streaming server can use DICOM files as source files.
• Updates to Media Foundation Components
  • New Media Foundation target formats:
    • 3GP: Video (H264) - Audio (AAC and AMRNB).
    • MP3.
    • MPEG-2: Video (H264, HEVC) - Audio (AAC, AAC-ADTS, AC3, MP3, and MPEG-2 Audio).
    • WAVE: Audio only (MP3, PCM, and FLOAT).
    • FLAC.
    • FMPEG4: Video (H264) - Audio (AAC, AC3, and ALAC).
    • AVI: Video (Uncompressed video colors, M-JPEG) - Audio (PCM).
    • MPEG-2 Transport: Video (H264 and HEVC) - Audio (AAC, AAC-ADTS, AC3, MP3, and MPEG-2 Audio).
    • ADTS: Audio (AAC and AAC-ADTS).
    • AC-3: Audio (Dolby AC-3 Audio).
  • Update Media Foundation targets with new audio and video formats
    • MP4: Added audio formats (AC3, ALAC, and FLAC).
    • MKV: Added new video formats (VP8 and VP9) and new audio format (OPUS).
  • Added support for .webm format to LEAD MKV media source.
  • Added support to select between available hardware and software encoders.
  • Added new decoders, encoders and target format:
    • LEAD MCMW Decoder.
    • LEAD MJ2K Decoder.
    • LEAD MCMP Decoder.
    • LEAD MJPEG Decoder.
    • LEAD MJPEG Encoder.
    • AVI Target format.

New in LEADTOOLS Imaging Engine

• Xamarin Camera
  • Added control of preview size and frame rate.
• New Image Processing Functions
  • Extract Object - Extracts connected groups of pixels from an image.
  • Canny Edge Detector.
  • Forms Field Detector.
• Updates to Formats
  • Optimized memory usage for J2K format.
  • Expanded J2K support to include some files that do not follow the specification.
  • Added support to load 8-bit TIFF and PNG files with 8-bit alpha for transparency.
  • Added support for ANSI, UTF7, UTF8, UTF16LE, UTF16BE encoded text files.
  • Added support to load CGM files saved with text encoding.
  • Added support to render Medium Map Overlay for AFP (MODCA) documents.

Additional Changes

• New powerful Xamarin demos that show more features of LEADTOOLS in a Xamarin development environment. These new demos are designed to look like end-user applications, but the source code for them is included so that anyone can get a head start. Below are some of the new demos included in version 21:
  • Annotations Demo.
  • Barcode Demo.
  • Business Card Reader Demo.
  • Camera Demo.
  • Converter Demo.
  • DICOM Demo.
  • Document Viewer Demo.
  • Image Processing Demo.
  • Live Filter Demo.
  • MICR Demo.
  • OCR Demo.
• Maven repository for Android.

Changes to the LEADTOOLS Product Line in Version 21

• The following products have been renamed:
  • LEADTOOLS Document Imaging to LEADTOOLS Document.
  • LEADTOOLS Recognition Imaging to LEADTOOLS Recognition.
  • LEADTOOLS Document Imaging Suite to LEADTOOLS Document Suite.
  • LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging to LEADTOOLS Medical.
  • LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging Suite to LEADTOOLS Medical Suite.
• The following products have been added.
  • LEADTOOLS Forms - includes all features of the LEADTOOLS Recognition product, including ICR, MICR, MRZ, and OMR, plus forms recognition and processing.
• The following products have been removed.
  • LEADTOOLS PACS Imaging - functionality moved into the LEADTOOLS Medical product.
  • LEADTOOLS Medical Multimedia Module - functionality moved into the LEADTOOLS Medical product.
  • LEADTOOLS Dental Display Module.
• The LEADTOOLS Document Suite and the Medical family of products include all features of LEADTOOLS Multimedia.