Page 29 - MSDN Magazine, September 2018

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MSDN MAGAZINE VENDOR PROFILE
MSDN Magazine Vendor Profile
LEADTOOLS Imaging SDKs Modeling Excellence and Dependability
A Q&A with Hadi Chami, Developer Support Manager
What is new in LEADTOOLS Version 20?
Our biggest goal for Version 20 was to make LEADTOOLS available on every major platform. To accomplish this, we extended our technology with new libraries leveraging .NET Standard targeting .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin app models.
With these new platforms also came new delivery mechanisms. A majority of our .NET libraries are now available via NuGet packages. NuGets were heavily requested by our customer base and we made sure to provide thoughtfully bundled feature groups developers are already using. Putting LEADTOOLS on NuGet.org helps customers get coding faster and stay up to date with current builds.
LEADTOOLS is a pretty comprehensive toolkit.
What could you say LEADTOOLS is best known for? That’s a tough question! Like you said, LEADTOOLS is very compre- hensive with SDKs for Document, Medical, Multimedia, and Raster Imaging. In recent years, OCR and Document Viewing have been our top performing technologies. We have our own, in-house developed OCR engine we are constantly improving, as opposed to putting a stagnant wrapper around a 3rd party engine. The LEAD engine is very fast and accurate, and our head OCR developer just finished up his PhD. thesis on character recognition.
Our HTML5/JavaScript Document Viewer is also a headlining component for us. The modern workforce relies heavily on digital documents, but it’s not just TIFF and PDF anymore. Word, Excel, RTF, Text, PNG, and JPEG files are commonly in the mix whenever you look at someone’s cloud storage or ECM. Our Document Viewer can treat all formats uniformly, allowing you to search text, convert, save/edit annotations, etc. Best of all, as a web application that runs on Windows or Linux servers, it’s incredibly secure and adaptable, providing scalable zero-footprint document viewing to any desktop, tablet, or smart phone with a web browser.
What sets LEADTOOLS apart from other
commercial and open-source SDKs?
Finding the right SDK is tough enough, but many applications need multiple libraries. LEADTOOLS is broad enough for you to standard-
ize on LEADTOOLS for all imaging requirements and eliminate multiple-vendor headaches.
Stack Overflow is great, but sometimes you need a personal touch. Our Support can prove to be a huge advantage over many open- source options where you are largely on your own. LEADTOOLS isn’t a side-project developed in our spare time, it’s our core product. We are a twenty-eight-year-old company, and are committed to building, maintaining, and supporting our technology.
How is LEADTOOLS adapting to the new ways developers are writing applications?
In addition to offering NuGet packages, LEAD created LEADTOOLS Cloud Services, an alternative development framework. This high- powered, scalable Web API gives developers a hassle-free interface for integrating advanced recognition and document conversion into any application. LEADTOOLS Cloud Services provides all the speed, accuracy, and reliability you have come to expect from LEADTOOLS but is neatly packaged into a simple, pay-as-you-go Web API hosted on Microsoft Azure. With minimal requirements, developers can use their API key to make JSON requests via several programming languages, including PHP, Python, and Perl. Additionally, a wider array of tools and IDEs can be used including Visual Studio Code, Sublime, and Notepad++.
For more information, visit g www.leadtools.com