What’s new in version 14 NEW

New document viewer engine

This new version comes with a brand new and redesigned rendering engine permitting to render large bitmap very quickly, and display multipage documents in a multiple page view mode.  It has been implemented into the WinForms version of the GdViewer control, for all supported Frameworks.

New document converter class

A new class to handle fast document conversion has been added to the toolkit. It permits to quickly convert any supported document format by GdPicture (more than 100) to popular formats such as PDF and TIFF, by handling every aspect of the conversion (color space, metadata, annotations, image, text…). (GdPicture Ultimate edition required).

New document segmentation class

A new class to segment document has been added to the toolkit. It permits to detect page layout (paragraphs / lines / words) or simply detect connected blobs on a bitmap. (GdPicture Ultimate edition required).

New supported document formats

RTF, DXF are now supported for viewing and conversion. Render & display, get thumbnail, browse, search, convert to PDF or bitmap…
View these documents within GdViewer & DocuVieware with multipage view mode, text search, text selection & extraction and more.

WSQ and ICO image files are also supported for viewing and conversion.

Optical Character recognition  (OCR)

GdPicture.NET 14 comes with a brand new class (GdPictureOCR) which includes near than 100 new features to better manage OCR processes.  It provides segmentation features, support for OCRing any document to DOCX, HTML, PDF, and text files. It is now possible to process multiple regions of the same document very quickly with advanced support to control characters set, words association, voting mechanism, OCR mode, adaptive classification…

The OCR engine has been dramatically improved to reduce memory usage, enhance stability, and increase accuracy (especially with poor quality bitmap and very large bitmap).

There is also much improvement and bug fixes to better read Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic text.

 Searchable PDF Generation (PDF-OCR)

GdPicture.NET 14.0 searchable PDF (PDF-OCR) creation has been improved. The creation is now faster and the produced files are smaller.

The character recognition engine has been optimized to use less memory, and the PDF page recognition method has been improved to avoid wasting time on existing visible text. Rotation detection and top of the art skew-detection have been implemented to permit OCR on any kind of oriented pages automatically.

Long term archiving (PDF/A)

PDF/A is an ISO standard for long-term archiving of electronic documents. Thanks to GdPicture.NET PDF/A capabilities, it is possible to create standardized electronic documents that can be rendered reliably over time on any system, when opened with a compliant viewer.

GdPicture.NET 14.0 is able to generate any flavor of PDF/A: PDF/A -1a, PDF/A -1b, PDF/A -2a, PDF/A -2b, PDF/A -2u, PDF/A -3a, PDF/A -3b and PDF/A -3u.

Additional PDF support features

Most important parts of the PDF core have been enhanced to improve parsing, writing, rendering, memory usage and speed.
GdPicture.NET 14.0 comes with a new font generation engine supporting subsetting of True Type fonts when writing PDF with Unicode content. The software now supports OpenType font for Unicode text drawing. The new text extraction algorithm builds text closer to the natural reading order.
GdPicture.NET is now up to 5 times faster reading a complex PDF and dramatically faster writing pdf text. GdPicture.NET produces smaller file and the compatibility with several viewers has been improved.
Other new features and enhancements include:

• Support for transfer functions to the PDF rasterizer.
• Added support for applying digital signature with Timestamp.
• New CCITT filter decoder.
• Support for adding JPEG image to PDF without decoding / re-encoding the image.
• Improved speed of the PDF rasterizer for jbig2 bitmap.
• PDF packing has been improved for documents with links.
• Improved page normalization support.
• Improved processing speed (and memory usage) of big documents.
• Printing: reduced generated spool size for some complex documents.
• Printing: improved quality of produced pages, especially with virtual printers.
• PDF/UA support.
• PDF 2.0 support.

Office Open Xml Word Processing Document

GdPicture.NET 14.0 includes a lot of improvements of the rendering engine and provides support for tables content and pictures. The rendering engine is up to 80% faster.

MICR engines

Dramatically improved MICR engine accuracy and speed for CMC7 and E13B fonts. Improved check reader engine.

MRC Compression engine

Dramatically improved the MRC engine to produce smaller and better quality PDFs.

Barcode engines

The GdPicture.NET barcode reading engines use an error correction mechanism which makes the reading robust to noise caused by low image quality. An improved error correction mechanism has been introduced within GdPicture.NET 14.0 to improve the speed and accuracy of the engines.

Barcodes use finder pattern to locate the code within a document. The processing of the finder pattern has been fine tuned to improve the speed and the barcode coordinates retrieved by the engines.

The following figures have been obtained when comparing GdPicture.NET 14.0 engines to GdPicture.NET 12.0 engines on a wide collection of documents:

• 1D barcode reading engine
  • 10% more barcodes recognized
  • 44% more patch codes recognized
  • 14% faster
• Data matrix barcode reading engine
  • 15% more barcodes recognized
• PDF 417 reading engine
  • 14% more barcodes recognized
  • 40% faster
• QR code reading engine
  • 18% faster
  • 24% more barcodes recognized

Document Imaging Filters

• GdPicture.NET page auto-deskew accuracy has been improved. A better correction of the skew introduced when making use of an automatic document feeder during the scan improves the legibility of the document (together with the character recognition accuracy).
• The accuracy of the blank page detection engine has been dramatically improved to better sort empty pages, to handle punch holes and margins. It can also now be applied on specific region of interest.
• Added support for region of interest to the blank page detection algorithm.
• The blank page detection engine can now identify margins and punch holes.
• Introduced a new color dropout filter to drop a specific color into several contexts: drop out forms, etc..
• Improved color detection engine accuracy.
• Dramatically improved all borders detection filters.
• Punch hole removal filter is now able to remove punch holes from greyscale and color images.
• Punch hole removal filter now removes punch holes from documents scanned with a white background scanner.
• Punch hole removal filter now removes punch holes made by specialized hole punch for comb binding (rectangles).
• Added a new sophisticated Despeckle filter for bitonal images.

Annotation comments

GdPicture.NET 14.0 helps integrator tackle the document review challenge thanks to the new comment feature.

GdPicture.NET based applications can store comments within all formats supported by GdPicture.NET (more than 100) including PDF and TIFF. Thanks to this new feature, these applications can offer collaborative document review as the participants can share information during the review process.

Comments support has been introduced by the mean of an update the GdPicture/XMP annotation scheme.

Wang annotation support

Wang annotation is an old and badly documented annotation format. In order to help several customers in trouble with thousands of documents using this deprecated format, ORPALIS has developed tools to convert these old-fashioned files to state of the art annotated PDFs or TIFFs.

This tool is available as open source project on github. See: https://github.com/Orpalis/WangTagReading

Image codecs improvements

• GdPicture.NET image compression speed has been improved:
  • Up to 25% faster decoding JPEG2000
  • About 10-15% faster compressing JPEG images on 64-bit systems
  • 30% up to 50% faster compressing PNG images with predictors
• Improved RAW images loading speed and added support for more than 80 new cameras
• Support for reading and writing alpha channel within BMP files (bitmap info header version 5)
• Improved document format detection
• Added support to append pages to existing multipage tiff images without the need to re-encode existing pages

Miscellaneous

• Added support for compressed bitmap using memory transfer mode when scanning via Twain
• Improved Twain memory transfer speed
• Improved 1D barcode writer encoding
• GdViewer (WinForm and wpf) now honors the exif rotation tag of the displayed image
• Improved MRC speed and accuracy
• Improved primitive drawing speed (rectangle, ellipse, line, path…) (up to 3x faster)
• The reference guide has been dramatically improved and will be continuously updated

Global improvements in DocuVieware

Benefiting from the latest improvements in GdPicture.NET 14.0, a lot has been done in the inside of DocuVieware 3.0 at several levels to improve performance, memory footprint and, therefore, user experience.

The rendering quality of images has also been greatly improved for certain zoom levels and the PDF rendering time has been dramatically speeded up. Data transfer speed between server and client is faster.

Format support has also been improved and it is now possible to export a Microsoft Office OpenXML document to vector PDF.

Added support for link to URI.

Added support for ASP.NET Core Web Applications (.NET Framework).

Added link annotation support in built-in annotation palette.

DocuVieware TWAIN acquisition

The DocuVieware TWAIN Web Connector 2.0 now supports TWAIN acquisition over HTTPS so it does not break the security chain in SSL secured environments. All the security aspect is automatically taken care of during the installation process so it is totally transparent to both the user and developer.

DocuVieware 3.0 also allows to programmatically define a default configuration using the corresponding JavaScript client API methods that have been added. Besides the acquisition settings, you can also choose whether you want the device driver dialog to appear or not, so it is now possible to silently scan documents within DocuVieware and make the acquisition process easier for your end users.

DocuVieware new Comment feature and built-in Snap-In

In the continuity of the existing annotation system, a new annotations comment feature has been added to GdPicture.NET 14.0 to help integrators tackle the document review challenge.

DocuVieware 3.0 provides a new built-in rich user experience Snap-In that allows users to add, remove and edit comments.

The collaborative document review process is made easy for everyone thanks to comment statuses and discussion support allowing a user to answer to an existing content.

This comment feature is available for PDF and TIFF document but also for all the 100+ document formats DocuVieware supports.

DocuVieware printing support

Header and footer have been removed when printing in Chrome and Firefox. Page alignment is now centered by default.

DocuVieware User Interface localization

DocuVieware 3 supports several new languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Korean, Slovenian and Hebrew. This increases the number of supported languages in DocuVieware 3.0 to 25.

DocuVieware learning resources and tutorials

A new set of tutorials is provided to facilitate DocuVieware 3.0 integration in any web technology. Those richly illustrated step by step guides demonstrate how to serve DocuVieware through a REST API and integrate it inside your application using JavaScript, Angular, PHP, Java, ASP.NET and more.

.NET Framework

GdPicture.NET 14.0 supports .NET Framework 4 and higher. The software development kit is compatible with Windows XP and higher. The COM/ActiveX edition is now targeting the .NET 4.0 Framework (was 4.5) making it compatible on all operating system since Windows XP.

All GdPicture.NET 14.0 features are now available on all supported .NET Frameworks, including Office Open Xml support.