LEAD Technologies has released Version 17 of LEADTOOLS Document and Recognition Imaging Software Development Kits (SDKs). LEADTOOLS 17 offers new imaging technology and is designed for software developers who look for imaging features and tools for rapid development.

LEADTOOLS 17 supports pure Silverlight development. Most of its functionality such as image format loading and saving, image processing, displaying, compression, and effects can be used in Silverlight without any server calls or external dependencies.
“LEADTOOLS 17 marks the completion of a major milestone in LEAD’s Silverlight development roadmap,” said Gabriel Smith, Marketing Manager at LEAD Technologies. “Armed with more than 20 years of imaging expertise and the experience of working with tens of thousands of developers world-wide, we are porting all LEADTOOLS functionality to Silverlight, putting higher priorities on the features our customers request the most. Based on those requests, this upgrade includes a vast number of basic and advanced image features, some of which no other “pure” Silverlight SDK can claim. The Silverlight functionality in LEADTOOLS greatly expands what is possible for imaging developers who would otherwise use only Visual Studio.”

The new LEADTOOLS Arabic OCR Module can recognize Arabic text in images and is capable of converting the image to searchable formats, including Doc, HTML and PDF. The SDK features improved Asian OCR recognition results, improved support for Korean, Japanese, simplified Chinese as well as traditional Chinese character sets. The LEADTOOLS Advantage OCR engine includes Constrained ICR, enhanced table and font detection, as well as improved accuracy and speed.