Spring is coming and so is GdPicture.NET 9.4!

So, talking about renewal, v.9.4 has new barcode encoders for 2D barcodes (QR-Code, DataMatrix and PDF417)!

That’s not all of course: we provide new features, enhancements and bug fixes, just check out some of them:

• New Sauvola local adaptive thresholding method with contrast normalization.
• Bitonal image filters speed enhancement.
• Unicode support for the QRCode reader engine added.
• Improvement of the Gaussian filter.
• Optional drop shadow effect to the GdPicture.XMP annotation added.
• Improvements of 1D & 2D barcode reading speed and accuracy.
• New function for counting the number of unique colors in an image.
• Horizontal and vertical alignment support in AnnotationText objects.
• SquaredBox property for AnnotationRectangle, AnnotationRectangleHighlighter and AnnotationEllipse objects added.
• Improvements of the internal Image decoding engine.
• PDF text extraction and annotation support improved.
• Battery of minor bug fixes.
• Documentation enhancements and lots of new code snippets.

The complete list can be found here.

GdPicture.NET 9.4 is available on the download page of the Gdpicture website.

Upgrade to v 9.4 is free for all GdPicture.NET v.9 owners.
If you own a GdPicture.NET v.7 or v.8 license, you can directly order the upgrade to v9.4.
Other upgrade cases will be solved by our Sales team so feel free to contact us via our Quick Contact Form.

We have also modified the Comparison Matrix by displaying more features and details about them, in a structured manner.
And you can consult it as both HTML or PDF so now you can also download it, share it and easily print it!

That’s all for now!

Cheers!

The GdPicture team

It’s Awards time again!

This year GdPicture and our flagship product Gdpicture.NET climb up a few more steps in the Top 25 Publisher and Bestselling Product at ComponentSource! For the first time GdPicture Document Imaging SDK becomes the first publisher of its category in the Bestselling Publisher list:

ComponentSource is the world’s leading marketplace and community for software components and development tools.

The ComponentSource awards are given to the Top 100 Bestselling Publishers and the Top 100 Bestselling Products based on the total sales dollar value of orders placed by customers during the year (2012) through ComponentSource.

We’ve come a long way since the GdPicture debut in the top 100 in 2009-2010! Congratulations to our team and a big “merci” to all our customers, both faithful and new!

Cheers!

The GdPicture Team

We’re a bit late for that but we hope that you spent a terrific Halloween!

We have some new things for you today:

• GdPicture.NET version 9.3 has been released including custom annotation support, interactive PDF features support, PDF form field editing support, new bitonal filters and more than 50 other features;
• Licensing modifications concerning GdPicture.NET Document Viewer SDK and the GdPicture.NET TWAIN Editions;
• A new tool to select the GdPicture products configuration you need, aka the Product Selector.

GdPicture.NET 9.3

What’s new?

• Features to customize the PDF bookmark control appearance added.
• Barcode detection (1D & 2D) improved on fax and high resolution images.
• GdPictureImaging: SaveAsIStream, SaveAsStream, SaveAsByteArray & SaveAsString now fully support multipage tiff creation and JPEG 2000, targa, exr, wbmp, xpm and PBM format.
• Memory usage of the bitonal image filters reduced.
• Spaces detection accuracy in the OCR engine improved.
• Improvements of the generated PDF/OCR quality.
• PDF files linking support for creating and for viewing purpose added.
• Interactive PDF features support: Actions, document-level navigation and more…
• Printing support improved when autofit and automaticRotation options are simultaneously activated.
• Custom annotation support added.
• Support for form fields creation and edition added.
• 3 new bitonal image filters(Erode, ErodeV & Dilate) added.
• PDF rasterizer improved (memory usage reduced and compatibility with some malformed objects increased).
• Improvements on the FTP & HTTP transfer support.
• PDF text extraction and search improved.
• Latest reported bugs fixed, new samples provided in the package, documentation enhancements.
• Improvement of the mouse position’s zoom mode.
• Memory usage improvement, especially for huge bitmap embedded in PDF documents.

The full change log is available on our forum in this post.

We remind you that you can upgrade to GdPicture.NET 9.3 from any previous version at any time.
The lastest version of GdPicture.NET is available on the download page of the Gdpicture website.
The upgrade from GdPicture.NET v9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 to 9.3 is free.
If you own a GdPicture.NET v7 or v8 license, you can directly order the upgrade to v9.3 . For any other upgrade case you can contact our team to get a commercial offer via our Quick Contact Form .

Licensing Modifications

To make the choice between our different products easier for you, we did the following changes in our GdPicture.NET Editions:

• the PDF bookmark navigation control is now included in the GdPicture.NET Document Viewer SDK Edition.
• GdPicture.NET TWAIN and TWAIN Pro Editions merged to a single TWAIN Edition. The new GdPicture.NET TWAIN Edition includes all features of the previous TWAIN and TWAIN Pro Editions.

You can see these changes in our Comparison Matrix.

Product Selector

In addition to our Comparison Matrix we created a Product Selector The Product Selector helps you determine the toolkits that match your needs.
In other words with the Product Selector you get the right configuration (the GdPicture.NET Edition and the Plugin(s) you need) and the right price in a few clicks!

That’s all for now!

Cheers,

The GdPicture Team

A new medium version of Gdpicture.NET 9 can now be downloaded on our website here.

So, what’s new in Gdpicture.NET 9.2?

•  Base64 encoding/support to the GdPicture/XMP Annotation Plugin. Especially for JavaScript usage.
• Support for unsupported file types in the ThumbnailEx control allowing to specify custom image. IE: an office icon.
• Speed improvement of the TIFF encoder with CCITT3 and CCITT4 compression schemes.
• Fast page resizing/scaling for the PDF format, without quality and compression loss.
• Support to create bitmap from separated Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black images.
• Private tag reading and writing at page level for the PDF format.
• GdPicture/XMP Annotation support improved (new methods).
• Improvement of the PDF form-fields parsing support.
• TWAIN behavior customization to handle some unstable TWAIN drivers.
• Improvement of document format detection support.

We also worked on our documentation, which is now improved: new snippets and new demo applications are available.

You will find the complete list of changes and the new methods of the GdPictureImaging, GdPicturePDF, AnnotationManager, ThumbnailEx and GdViewer classes on our GdPicture.NET 9 changelog forum post.

Cheers!

The Gdpicture Team

As usual we have continuously worked on the toolkit core introducing speed enhancements while reducing memory usage.

We have also fixed all the latest reported bugs and introduced a new set of features based on customer requests. Let’s start working on 9.2 now!

Main changes:

• Added support for loading the entire document into the memory before the start of the decoding process. This allows to subsequently overwrite or delete the source file.
• Stream support improvement. Documents can now be loaded from non-seekable stream objects.
• Added item insertion in the ThumbnailEx control.
• Owner drag & drop support in ThumbnailEx. New example in vb & c# added demonstrating drag & drop between two ThumbnailEx objects.
• Added asynchronous support for item deletion, modification & insertion in the ThumbnailEx control.
• Improved image compression performances.
• Improved TWAIN support with Citrix and WPF applications.
• Improved document rendering speed.
• PDF caching mechanism improved, especially for image attributes extraction.
• Improved document type identification by header analysis.
• Small performance enhancements & minor bug fixes.

Full changes log is available in our community forum through this thread.

Full changes log from GdPicture.NET 9.0.9 to 9.013 is also available here.

Drag & drop between two ThumbnailEx objects.

Besides SLA plan , another new thing we have introduced starting with GdPicture.NET v.9 is license keys activation mechanism.

License activation actually links your GdPicture.NET product(s) license(s) with the machine(s) on which it has been installed for development purposes, in order to prevent un-authorized use and to protect our users from counterfeit software.

Activation is done through our LicenseManager.exe tool, it requires an internet connection and it concerns both demo and commercial keys (new and upgrade licenses).
After succesfull activation (or license registration) via internet, you will have to call the RegisterKEY function from your code in order to make GdPicture.NET toolkit work within your project.

DEMO
After downloading GdPicture.NET, when starting LicenseManager.exe from your installation folder, you will notice the “Request a trial key” button.
Click it, then fill in the next form in order to automatically receive a demo key (please see the 2 snapshots below).
The key will already be registered so no further actions are required from your side regarding registering.
At the same time, a SLA priority plan will be assigned to you so you will benefit from free technical support during the 30 days evaluation time.

COMMERCIAL
After receiving a commercial key, please enter it in the LicenseManager.exe (“Your License Key” box), hit the “Register a key” button then fill in the next form (please see the 2 snapshots below).
Your license key will get registered and, at the same time, a SLA priority plan will be assigned to you so you will benefit from free technical support for the entire cycle of life of v.9.
Multiple-developers license-type owners only receive 1 license key but the key can be registered as many times as the number of purchased seats.

Important note: registering a license can be done only once per physical machine but the same license can be used for an unlimited number of virtual machines installed on that machine.
And should your machine(s) get changed, renewed or upgraded, you will need to re-register (re-activate) your license(s) by contacting our Support service.

Cheers!

A SLA priority support plan is automatically assigned to you at the same time than the license activation.
SLA (Support Level Agreement) priority plan allows owners of v.9 demo or commercial licenses to get priority support by contacting our Technical Support team via our Helpdesk System (tickets).
Support is free and it is available for the entire period of the trial time (30 days) for evaluators and for the entire cycle of life of v.9 for commercial keys owners.

Actually two SLA plans are available:

1- Evaluation Support Plan (one month duration)

The “countdown” starts at the moment you obtain your free evaluation key delivered through the LicenseManager.exe tool located in your GdPicture.NET installation folder, as described in the evaluation page.

2- GdPicture9 Support Plan (available as long the GdPicture.NET 9 toolkit is maintained)

This plan is automatically activated by using the “Register Key” button of the LicenseManager.exe tool to register a commercial key. For more information please read the topic “Installing & Activating GdPicture.NET” in the reference guide.

Important: Tickets without any SLA support plan will not be accepted on the helpdesk system. Also, do not forget that we provide non-priority support, code-samples by request and more through our community forums and all our reference guides are online so a wealth of resources is available on our website even for users who don’t have a SLA plan.

Cheers!

Before anything else the developing team would like to say thank you to all the BETA testers for their remarks and suggestions. A constructive BETA makes a successful final release! Merci à tous !

So now, what are the new features and functionalities of GdPicture.NET 9?

We created a webpage with the full description of the new features, functionalities, methods and properties of GdPicture.NET 9. You will find it here.

And a new Reference Guide for the version 9 is available there.

To sum up, here are the main changes in the different categories:

Toolkit Core

• Binaries for NET Framework 4.5.
• Memory usage optimization and speed enhancement.
• Better error handling.
• User controls appearance customization improved.
• Multithreading handling improvement especially with the ThumbnailEx control.
• Better stream handling.
• Temporary files creation avoided while loading from stream, array of bytes or string data (especially for usage in cloud or in sand-box).
• Several Unicode issues fixed.
• OCR & PDF support for RTL languages such as Arabic improved.

Annotations

• Memory usage optimization and speed enhancement.
• Synchronisation with other GdPciture Objects (ThumbnailEx, AnnotationEditor, BookmarkTree…) improved.
• Support for loading and saving annotations of all pages of a document from/to a single XML block.
• Ruler annotation added.

PDF

• PDF rasterizer produces any Pixel format bitmap.
• Support for linearized PDF creation (fast web view mode).
• PDF Transparency support for rendering.
• PDF rendering speed increased by 15-30% with lower memory usage.
• PDF formfield and annotation flattening quality increased.
• PDF support for alpha channel when adding 32-bit ARGB bitmap (soft mask).
• PDF Document Viewing preference support.
• Full files attachment support (embedded file stream).
• Full PDF transparency support (blend modes).
• Graphics state stack and transformation matrix support.
• Digital signature validation with certificate and document content checking as well as digital certificate support with stamp.
• Page duplication and drawing support.
• Bookmark reading and writing support.
• Adding pages directly from another PDF.

Document Imaging

• Speed improvement of the document imaging filters (autodeskew, despeckle…)
• New 8bpp and 4bpp quantizer with very high quality, high speed and low memory usage.
• GIF encoder enhancement to produce better quality image with a dramatically increased speed.
• Faster image resizer on indexed bitmaps.
• Memory usage drastically decreased for document filters.
• Better support for large tiff files (IE 4GB multipage tiff documents).
• Dramatic speed increase in handling editable multipage tiff & gif.
• Multipage documents opened in read and write mode by default (as fast as the previous read-only mode).
• New blob, noise and sophisticated line removal filters.

Barcoding

• Detection of barcode type specification during 1D barcode recognition process.
• Option to return undecodable barcode.
• Added option to specify the number of expected recognized barcode for 1D, Datamatrix , QRCode and PDF417 reader.
• Speed and accuracy of the 1D, QR-Code and DataMatrix barcode readers increased.Memory usage decreased.
• New PDF417 Barcode Reader Plugin.

The PDF417 Barcode Recognition Plugin also has its dedicated page. You will find it here.

How do I upgrade to Gdpicture.NET 9?

According to our policies all our GdPicture licenses come with a 6 month upgrade protection. Owners of a GdPicture.NET license version 8 since January 1st 2012 are eligible for a free upgrade to GdPicture.NET 9. For any upgrade request, create a sales ticket (which includes your license key serial number) on our helpdesk at http://support.gdpicture.com/ selecting the sales upgrade department.

For other cases, you will find our pricing list here. Do not hesitate to contact us if you need anything!

We wish you the very best for your projects!

Cheers,

The GdPicture Team

What does end-of-life mean?

After July 1st 2012, we will no longer provide updates, security fixes or customer support for GdPicture 5 series.

What does this mean for your license?

According to our policies and license agreement, your license continue to work perpetually.
However, after July 1st 2012, we won’t be able to help with any customer support question or issue related to the software.

Upgrade to GdPicture.NET 8/9: Before August 1st 2012

You can upgrade your GdPicture 5 license to GdPicture.NET 8/9 by contacting us through our helpdesk plateform. Select “Submit a Support Ticket” and chose the “GdPicture Sales – Upgrades” department.

You can find offer conditions on this page: http://www.gdpicture.com/GdPicture5-Legacy.php

The 2011-2012 ComponentSource Awards have just been announced and we are among the winners for both best-selling publisher and best-selling product for GdPicture.NET.

As publisher, our Company ranked 20-th in Top 25 Best-selling Publisher 2011-2012 , up from 30-th place last year, in ComponentSource overall publisher list.
Our flagship product, GdPicture.NET SDK, ranked 24-th in Top 25 Best-selling Products for 2011-2012 , up from 48-th place last year in ComponentSource overall best-selling products list.

ComponentSource awards are granted based on their worldwide sales facts and figures.

A perfect opportunity for us to express our gratitude to all our users for choosing our software and for the feedback, upon which we’ve distributed our efforts.

 
Thank you!

The GdPicture team