Technical FAQs for "ImageGear"
After years of discussion and debate over the state of digital transformation in the legal field, 2020 delivered something of an ultimatum to an industry that has proven historically resistant to drastic change. The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly altered the way many law firms do business, forcing them to seek out a variety of LegalTech solutions to survive in a new environment. Many of these changes are likely to remain firmly entrenched in the coming years, so it’s worth taking a look back at the factors driving them.
COVID-19 and Change in the Legal Industry
From an outsider’s perspective, the legal industry might have appeared to be uniquely well-suited to adapt to the pandemic. Lawyers are high-skill workers with an extensive range of technology solutions at their fingertips to facilitate remote work. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which many aspects of the legal process, from client intake to discovery to filing documents with the court, are handled virtually, without anyone needing to step foot outside their home office.
The reality, unfortunately, isn’t so simple. While it’s true that there are several innovative tools available that could support remote work, the legal industry has long struggled to adopt them at scale. Part of that has to do with the culture of law firms themselves, which tend to be driven by a traditional business model that hasn’t changed much since the 20th century.
Although the legal industry has benefited from technology throughout its history, the use of that technology has typically fallen not to the lawyers themselves, but to their support staff. From printing out reams and reams of documents to manually tracking time in minute-based increments, many lawyers cling to outdated and inefficient practices out of habit and aversion to change.
Although the Great Recession caused some disruption to the legal industry, the impact was not significant or lasting enough to make firms fundamentally rethink their billing and technology usage. That has changed in 2020. As the industry struggles to adapt to the realities of the pandemic, firms have been forced to engage in what Jennifer Leonard, Chief Innovation Officer for University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School, describes as “forced experimentation.” This includes implementing technologies already quite common in other industries, such as video conferencing tools and cloud-based collaboration software, as well as taking a more customer-centric approach to delivering legal services.
Key LegalTech Trends in 2020
The rapid transition to the remote workplace has forced legal firms to implement several years’ worth of technological change into the span of a few short months. Here are a few key LegalTech trends and needs that defined the industry in 2020.
Secure Online Communication
Successful transition to a remote work environment requires the right software tools to facilitate secure communication and collaboration. Lawyers not only need to be able to stay in direct contact with clients and colleagues, but also with the court system itself. With many judicial offices shuttered during the early months of the pandemic, courts have greatly expanded their use of e-filing, e-service, and online dispute resolution software. Various video conferencing platforms have also made it possible to conduct court hearings remotely. In a historic move, even the US Supreme Court chose to hear arguments over telephone.
With so many lawyers working remotely, however, security has become more important than ever. That’s because home networks and personal devices can present a variety of security risks. Sharing documents over unencrypted email rather than through more secure LegalTech applications could potentially compromise secure client information or legal strategies. That has driven firms to implement digital solutions that they might have been hesitant to adopt as recently as a year ago.
Online Legal Research
The research and discovery process has gradually been moving online for quite some time. According to research by the American Bar Association (ABA), nearly 70% of lawyers begin their legal research with a general search engine or paid online resource. All of that online research means that lawyers need to be able to securely access and convert multiple different file types. While many legal documents can be found in various online databases, they often exist in poorly scanned formats that are difficult to read or otherwise manipulate. In order to manage these documents effectively, firms need LegalTech applications with imaging and conversion tools that can perform image cleanup and then convert files into formats that are easier to work with.
Virtual Document Review
Whether they’re negotiating contracts or reviewing information as part of discovery, lawyers need to be able to annotate and redact documents without creating confusion over which edits are the most up-to-date. Version control has long been a challenge for the industry, whether it was multiple people working from different printed copies of a document or everyone having their own copy downloaded to a separate device. It’s no surprise, then, that LegalTech startups specializing in contract review software have had no difficulty finding investors during the pandemic. To meet the growing needs of remote legal firms, these platforms will need to deliver powerful editing and access control features that allow users to collaborate more efficiently.
Innovative Billing Strategies
Although law firms have historically weathered economic downturns better than the rest of the economy, the unique nature of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the industry hard in the first half of 2020. According to data gathered by Clio, billing and case volumes plunged in March and April before starting a slow recovery in May. That recovery has been uneven, however, punctuated by a few sharp declines even as overall caseloads return to baseline levels. Firms frequently responded by laying off staff, with 20% of firms having done so or expecting to as recently as July.
The pandemic has forced many firms to implement timekeeping and billing software to help improve efficiency and deliver more value-based services to their clients. Traditional billable hour approaches tended to discourage efficiency, so shifting to a more flexible and transparent system driven by digital tools can help provide firms with the flexibility they need to meet client needs under adverse conditions. Automating billing also allows legal teams to focus more on acquiring new clients and retaining existing clients.
More Changes Coming in 2021
Several legal industry trends from 2020 are expected to continue, or even accelerate, in 2021. Here are just a few areas that will likely remain key priorities for LegalTech developers seeking to meet the industry’s needs.
- Improving the Client Experience: With so much of the attorney-client relationship going remote, legal firms will need to continue investing in tools that allow them to communicate and interact with their customers more easily.
- More Cloud Adoption: Legal firms have been slow to adopt cloud-based LegalTech applications, but the pandemic has demonstrated the value of being able to access essential data and tools from anywhere at any time.
- Organizational Innovation: As LegalTech becomes more essential, law firms will likely continue to rethink their organizational structure by adding non-legal staff to drive digital transformation.
Unlock Your LegalTech Potential with Accusoft
Developing robust LegalTech platforms that help firms overcome the challenges of the remote workplace is a major challenge. Accusoft’s collection of content processing and conversion solutions allow development teams to easily integrate the collaboration and information-sharing tools lawyers require into your applications. Whether you’re incorporating our REST APIs or powerful SDKs, we provide the functionality your software needs so your team can focus on the innovative features that will set you apart in the crowded LegalTech market in 2021 and beyond.
To learn more about how our content solutions can enhance your legal applications, talk to one of our integration experts today.
Few organizations will view the final weeks of 2020 as a bittersweet moment. In addition to the staggering human toll inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, entire industries saw longstanding business models upended, forcing companies to completely rethink their relationships with employees, vendors, and customers. The financial services industry was no exception, and 2020 saw FinTech becoming more important than ever as firms rushed to embrace digital transformation in response to the ongoing crisis. Many of these trends appear poised to continue well into 2021 and beyond.
FinTech Defined
FinTech is short for “financial technology,” but the term itself is applied quite broadly throughout the financial services industry. It can be used to refer to a new generation of non-traditional startup companies focused on building digital tools that allow people to manage their finances in new ways that disrupt established industry practices. The term is also sometimes used to describe the technology itself, however, especially since established financial organizations are investing heavily in innovative applications and services of their own.
FinTech Trends for 2021
Although 2020 is sure to be remembered as a year of unprecedented disruption, 2021 might well come to be known as a year of remarkable adaptation and transformation. Now that organizations have developed innovative digital strategies to navigate a more volatile economic landscape, they must now take up the challenge of putting those plans into practice.
FinTech developers need to keep an eye on these trends as they build new applications and services in order to provide the functionality and performance demanded by the financial industry. Many established firms will be taking a long look at their infrastructure and technology solutions to assess whether or not their current systems are up to the challenge of digital transformation. If their existing platforms fall short, they will need to either seek out new FinTech products with more robust feature sets or explore options for integrating new capabilities into their legacy software.
Top 5 FinTech Trends to Watch in 2021
1. Customer-Centric Applications
The proliferation of FinTech solutions has brought customers to the forefront of every financial organization’s thoughts. Where the financial industry once designed processes and applications to suit their own needs, today they must focus on delivering a high-quality customer experience if they want to remain competitive in a crowded marketplace. The process often begins with reducing friction wherever possible to help end-users get the products and services they need faster. With customers increasingly interacting with the financial industry across multiple channels, FinTech developers must build solutions that strengthen those connections and expand their potential.
Eliminating manual processes, cutting down on external software dependencies, and automating routine tasks will continue to be a major point of emphasis for FinTech applications. Customers no longer have the patience to repeatedly fill out lengthy forms or go through the frustrating process of downloading, printing, signing, and scanning documents. By building document viewing, file conversion, and data capture capabilities into their applications, FinTech developers can provide firms with a unified digital solution that addresses multiple needs and streamlines their customer experience.
2. Digital-First Collaboration
According to an IDG study on the enduring business impacts of the COVID 19 pandemic, about 40% of employees are expected to be working remotely on a semi-permanent basis as of January 2021. That means financial organizations will continue to need digital tools in place to provide secure access to files and facilitate collaboration. Physical documents must first be converted into a variety of digital formats with high levels of accuracy and then made available to remote users without compromising data integrity or creating confusion over version history.
Without a dedicated solution on hand for viewing, editing, and managing documents, users are forced to resort to a variety of ad hoc workarounds and third party software solutions that can quickly compromise data security and increase the likelihood of errors. By integrating those features into their FinTech applications, developers can help firms keep all of their documents and files safely within a secure infrastructure while still making them available through easy-to-use web-based API tools.
3. Big Data Management
Financial organizations continue to collect huge amounts of data in the course of their business. Some of this data is unstructured and must be processed using powerful analytics tools to identify important trends and potential risks that can help firms make better strategic decisions. But they also gather a great deal of structured data as well, typically from structured forms like loan applications, tax documents, and bank statements. Managing all of this information more efficiently will be an important goal for 2021 because having good data insights is essential for identifying opportunities, optimizing products and services, and automating essential services.
FinTech developers can help improve data processing by building applications capable of extracting information quickly and accurately. Financial data algorithms are quite good at identifying different types of data and sorting it into the proper place for analysis, but they’re often slowed down by documents that are damaged or difficult to read. Thanks to software integrations that provide robust image cleanup, document alignment, and form recognition tools, FinTech applications can ensure that firms are starting with the cleanest possible source data when extracting information for processing.
4. Pandemic Proofing
Although there are several promising COVID-19 vaccines on the horizon, challenges with supply and distribution will keep most companies operating under the same social distancing and remote workplace guidelines they put in place in 2020 for much of the year. Even if restrictions are lifted earlier than expected, the risk-averse financial industry will continue to think about how to avoid similar disruptions by implementing paperless processes and electronic data capture options. Just as retailers and manufacturers are rethinking their supply chain infrastructure, financial services companies must reassess their FinTech applications in light of recent challenges.
Developers can help the financial industry better “pandemic proof” their processes by integrating better document viewing, file conversion, and data capture tools into their software solutions. Not only can they automate traditionally time-consuming (and error-prone) manual data entry tasks, but they can also build in additional functionality to auto-generate data for new contracts and allow people to sign documents digitally to eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings.
5. Banking Partnerships
Banks and other traditional financial institutions are increasingly partnering with FinTech startups to reach new customers and engage with existing clients over new channels. As Deloitte noted in a recent study, the pandemic has removed many of the obstacles to digital transformation in the financial industry and forced many established firms to pour tremendous resources into their tools and infrastructure. But as banks engage with innovative startups, they will need to find ways to integrate operations and data quickly to remain competitive and roll out new services successfully.
That integration process will be easier if they have flexible software solutions in place that can navigate multiple file types, perform cleanup and conversion, and extract essential data quickly and accurately. Whether they’re building that functionality into entirely new applications or integrating features into existing legacy systems, FinTech developers will play a key role in helping financial organizations accelerate their merger and partnership timetables so they can begin reaping the benefits more quickly.
Solving Your FinTech Challenges with Accusoft
Accusoft’s collection of RESTful APIs and SDKs provide FinTech developers with the tools they need to build comprehensive content processing, conversion, and automation solutions into software applications. Whether you’re using PrizmDoc Suite to view, edit, and convert documents directly inside their financial applications, capturing valuable financial data from various form types with FormSuite for Structured Forms, or embedding powerful image cleanup, OCR, and annotation tools into your application with ImageGear, our family of software integrations allow you to add the functionality your FinTech solutions need to meet the challenges of 2021 and beyond.
To learn more about how our software tools can enhance your FinTech applications, talk to one of our integration experts today.
The top InsurTech news for 2020? In a post-pandemic world, insurance technology offers “the prescription for safety.” In a world now dominated by worry around what’s currently happening, what will probably happen, and what could suddenly happen under the right (or wrong) circumstances, the agile and adaptable potential of InsurTech offerings paves the way for proactive service delivery that both boosts consumer piece of mind and reduces insurer risk.
For insurance companies to capitalize on evolving market conditions and outpace the competition, data-driven decision making is key. Even more critical is the need to convert critical information from standardized ACORD formats into actionable, accessible data. Here’s how Accusoft’s FormSuite for Structured Forms can help.
The InsurTech Innovation
As noted by research firm PWC, “What used to be a sign of success may not be anymore.” Now, clients want next-day decisions about insurance applications and claims along with detailed descriptions of cost assessments and timelines for action. What does this mean in practice?
That it’s no longer enough to rely on legacy solutions and applications to get the job done. Instead, companies need applications augmented by next-generation forms processing technology capable of integrating with internal assets while simultaneously delivering the data-driven decision-making inherently tied to quick, accurate, and complete insurance information capture.
Now more than ever, the fundamental value proposition for insurance companies is the ability to disrupt existing functional frameworks with new policies and practices that streamline document processing, improve decision timelines, and secure client data.
The ACORD Form Challenge
If building better applications was the only challenge facing InsurTech product managers and development teams, companies would have their hands full. There’s also a common form type that can be challenging for automation.
Since 1972, ACORD has been the source of standardized forms for the insurance industry. While these forms are standard, there is nothing standard about their format. Every year, ACORD changes the format of its forms, leaving insurance organizations with a challenge for automation.
Despite generalized standardization which sees consistency in the type of data recorded by specific forms — including client information, claim details, and policy requirements — how this data is structured and displayed within the form itself can vary from provider to provider and even agent to agent. Forms used for identical purposes are often close in format, but not quite the same when it comes to placement of critical data. This compels insurance agencies to manually process common forms, in turn increasing both the risk of human error and the time required for completion.
For insurance application developers looking to create applications that can process ACORD forms more efficiently and deliver on customer expectations around speed and accuracy, FormSuite for Structured Forms provides the capability to create a standard form library for easy form recognition and data capture.
The FormSuite Solution: Document Delivery Done Right
FormSuite for Structured Forms can help insurance companies get the best of both worlds. With an Agile framework, this SDK is capable of streamlining the standardization of ACORD-compliant forms with a little help from developers.
Key benefits of this solution include:
- Complete Forms Recognition — Manual data entry and capture both reduces forms processing speed and can introduce the potential for significant errors. Form recognition toolkits allow developers to create form libraries for their users to scan and recognize forms for data capture. In practice, this means developers only need to update the library when a new ACORD form is released to ensure reliable and robust recognition.
- Accurate Data Capture — With forms continually arriving from multiple sources, document standardization is often lacking. But no matter how forms are scanned into the system — upside down, sideways, or at differing resolutions — FormSuite uses its image cleanup functionality to deliver accurate forms processing.
- Form Field Detection — FormSuite uses the application’s form library to identify form fields on standard forms and capture the data within each form field.
- Optical Character Recognition — From optical character recognition (OCR) to intelligent character recognition (ICR) and optical mark recognition (OMR), FormSuite offers it all. Advanced OCR ensures your application can easily capture everything from legible hand printed names to check boxes and dollar amounts.
- Confidence and Accuracy Reporting — Data confidence matters for insurance documents. If uncertainty about data translates to errors in evaluation or decision-making, the results could be disastrous for ongoing ROI. That’s why FormSuite for Structured Forms generates customized confidence and accuracy values for all data captured. Firms then send all document OCR capture for confidence evaluation; if results meet or exceed confidence thresholds, document processing can continue automatically. If confidence levels are too low, meanwhile, your app can trigger employee review to ensure data entered matches captured results.
Embracing the InsurTech Advantage
Just as other industries have faced significant disruption this year, insurance companies now find themselves at an operational crossroads. While augmenting familiar forms and functions with application overlays offers the potential to improve on existing processes, firms must also build out apps and services capable of delivering accessible, actionable, and accurate ACORD forms data to staff. When they commit to doing this, insurance companies can deliver on the proactive promise of digital-first insurance with policies and processes capable of keeping pace with evolving client expectations.
Ready to improve insurance processes? Discover FormSuite for Structured Forms and deliver on document potential.
FinTech adoption continues to accelerate. According to Wealth Professional, almost 40 percent of finance firms now prioritize the adoption of FinTech frameworks, even as new-to-market startups disrupt the status quo.
However, spending alone isn’t enough to deliver streamlined and scalable FinTech processes. As noted by David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte in a recent protocol piece, firms now face the challenge of creating “high-quality, repeatable data processes with the profusion of systems involved in generating data” while simultaneously integrating unstructured and semi-structured data sources into existing processes.
At the front lines of this fundamental framework change is digital documents and business process workflows. Let’s dive in, and look at some of the biggest frustrations facing the finance industry, the solutions they need to streamline digital processes, and how Accusoft’s ImageGear can help redefine digital document delivery.
FinTech Framework Challenges
By leveraging data-driven techniques and digital-first processes, Forbes notes that it’s possible for even startup firms to differentiate their service delivery and compete with huge financial brands — but only when digital document processes align with on-demand performance expectations.
Consider common use cases such as loan origination, credit applications, or mortgage approvals. Many FinTech firms now target client pre-approval within 24 hours rather than the days or weeks required by traditional finance corporations. The problem? As digital document processes naturally scale, so does complexity, creating a practical paradox around three key challenges:
- Speed — As noted above, many FinTech firms are looking to disrupt incumbent efforts by reducing approval times and increasing customer satisfaction. As the number and type of digital documents required for timely approval expands, disparate processes conspire to stifle speed. Consider a loan origination requiring identity verification, income confirmation, and current debt load documents for pre-approval, all of which are in different file formats, forcing firms to use multiple software solutions and slowing their progress.
- Security — Cybersecurity and compliance are critical for FinTech firms to succeed, but both requirements come with rapid scaling complexity. For example, a recent FDIC document lists more than 200 types of Compliance Information and Document Request (CIDR) forms which must be customized for each financial use case. The result? Increased document processing volumes drives increased complexity and opens potential security gaps.
- Consistency — Digital data consistency is critical to ensure accurate approvals and assess potential risks, but contrasting document processes create the ideal environment for human error. Despite best efforts on the part of employees, the more manual processes introduced into FinTech functions, the greater the chance of misplaced assets or data conversion mistakes.
Streamlined Structure Solutions
To bridge the gap between FinTech potential and fast-track document processes, companies need solutions that deliver four broad benefits:
- Document Conversion — FinTech firms now face a diverse range of documents that often frustrate efforts to unify key data. Here, integrated conversion functionality is critical to ensure employees have the tools they need to quickly convert key documents without having to open multiple applications and manually move or manipulate data.
- On-Demand Annotation — Speaking of data, it’s also essential for staff to collaborate on key documents, especially as many FinTech firms embrace the remote work revolution. Advanced annotation tools that allow asynchronous collaboration are essential to ensure employees always have access to the most current document version and administrators can easily determine who edited documents, when, and why.
- Digital Compression — As digital documents become the de facto financial standard, storage space is at a premium. This is especially problematic for larger document types such as PDFs, which are often preferred by FinTech firms for the ability to easily control access, editing rights, and collaboration. Uncompressed, these PDFs can quickly overwhelm even enterprise storage systems, forcing companies to either spend more on cloud services or invest in bigger datacenters. Reducing PDF size both saves space and helps companies streamline document sharing.
- PDF Manipulation — While read-only access makes PDFs ideal for FinTech firms that need to share specific information without introducing security risk, adjusting and editing these documents in-house often requires multiple applications and increased employee effort. Even more worrisome? Staff encountering functional limits may opt for free, online applications that could compromise document confidentiality.
Practical Process Performance
ImageGear is designed to help FinTech firms both overcome current frustrations and help future-proof financial frameworks by combining disparate document functions into a single-source application and improve overall performance. Standout features include:
- Complete PDF Control — ImageGear provides a single-platform solution for PDF manipulation and control. Developers can easily integrate an SDK that enables application users to create, edit, view, and print PDFs from within the confines of existing applications, create searchable PDF documents, or flatten acroforms to remove file interactivity, all while automatically conforming to the PDF language standard.
- Secure Signature Verification — Secure digital signatures now form a critical component of on-demand FinTech forms processing. If companies can’t accept and verify client signatures, they’re not able to deliver speedy approvals and meet evolving consumer expectations. ImageGear allows companies to ensure that electronic documents are authentic. It uses encryption to verify that the information has not been altered and is coming from a trusted source.
- Agile Annotations — Making changes to PDF files is easy with ImageGear. Staff can quickly add text, lines, hot spots, encryption, rich text, images, or even audio as needed to ensure documents are complete, accurate, and ready for approval.
- Comprehensive Conversion Options — To deliver on the promise of FinTech performance, firms must be able to quickly and easily convert and combine multiple file types into a single PDF and convert PDFs as necessary into other file formats. ImageGear empowers developers to integrate a way for application users to quickly convert documents to PDF, create PDF/A files from raster images, and convert scanned pages into PDF searchable text using advanced optical character recognition (OCR). Annotations marks can also be converted as needed into XML files for enhanced auditability.
- Substantial File Size Reduction — ImageGear enables file compression of up to 45 percent to save valuable storage space and utilizes automatic analysis to determine optimal compression operations for best-fit results.
Ready to embrace the future of FinTech and redefine digital document delivery at scale? Start your free trial of ImageGear today!
Barcodes remain the basis for product identification and tracking, improving both operational insight and the end-user experience. From common applications in grocery stores to more advanced deployments in warehouses, legal firms, and even post-secondary schools, barcodes are the ubiquitous bridge between digital and physical environments.
As noted by Forbes, emerging pandemic pressures have precipitated the return of a familiar code framework, the QR code. Now used by retail stores and restaurants to enable touchless product identification and payment, this rapid code renaissance is a stark reminder that codes remain a key driver of long-term operational success. However, not all barcode reader tools are created equal. Some struggle to handle damaged or deformed barcodes, others limit the type and nature of the codes they scan, and many full-featured solutions come with significant complexity around installation, integration, and ease-of-use.
Barcode Xpress offers the best of both worlds. Here’s what developers need to know.
What is Barcode Xpress?
Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress makes it easy for users to read, write, and detect over 30 different barcodes with a single software development kit (SDK). Barcode Xpress supports:
- 1D Barcodes — Including Add-2, Add-5, Code 39, GS1 and UCC
- 2D Barcodes — Such as Aztec, Data Matrix, PDF417 and QR codes
- Postal Codes — From PLANET and PostNet to Royal Mail and the Australia Post 4-State Code
- Patch Codes — Including Patch 1, 2, 3, 4 (Toggle), 6 and Transfer
Barcode Xpress also reports confidence values for detected codes, reads supported barcodes in any orientation in milliseconds, and can intelligently handle poorly-printed, damaged, or badly-scanned barcode images. This SDK is also available in six development environments, including:
- .NET
- .NET Core
- ActiveX
- Java
- Linux
- Node.js
Basic Barcode Requirements
Deployment environments for Barcode Xpress must leverage one of the following x64 Windows versions:
- Windows 8.1
- Windows 10 Version 1607 and later
- Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and later
- Windows Server 2012, 2016 or 2019
The SDK can also be deployed on x64 Linux operating systems including:
- Ubuntu 18.04 or 16.04
- CentOS 8 or 7
- Debian 9 or 10
When it comes to Barcode Xpress development environments, requirements include Microsoft .NET Core 2.1 or later along with Java Runtime Environment 1.8 or later for License Manager and Server Licensing Utilities, along with Visual Studio 2017 or later (optional).
Ease of Installation
To streamline installation, Barcode Xpress .NET Core can be deployed via NuGet package or using a zip file provided by Accusoft. In both cases, developers require a valid license to use the SDK. Explore the different license types here.
Evaluation licenses allow your team to explore Barcode Xpress features bounded by timeouts and watermarks. Toolkit licenses remove pop-ups, time outs, and watermarks to enable in-depth development, while Runtime licenses are required to distribute your application.
Navigating NuGet
The simplest way to deploy Barcode Xpress is using the NuGet package manager for Microsoft development platform in Visual Studio. All of Accusoft’s NuGet packages can be found at nuget.org. Find the NuGet Barcode Express .NET package here.
To install the NuGet package, follow these steps:
- Open the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio.
- In the newly-opened window, ensure the Package Source is set to nuget.org and select the Barcode Xpress package.
- After selection and installation, look for the newly-added assemblies in your References folder.
- Add using [namespace] to any CS/VB file you’d like to reference these NuGet libraries.
Need more help? Check out the official NuGet tutorials.
Creating a Command Line
Ready to tackle your first project in Barcode Xpress? Here’s a step-by-step guide to building a complete C# application that analyzes 1D barcodes using Visual Studio.
1.Create a new Console App project in .NET core:
2. Add the Barcode Xpress SDK:
3. Add any required Microsoft dlls for the project. In this case, look for System.Drawing.Common at nuget.org, or add them locally if they’re already present as references in your development environment.
4. Add using statements to your generated Program.cs:Program.cs
using System;
using System.Drawing;
using Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSdk;
namespace MyProject
{
...
5. Create any necessary instances of Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSDK.BarcodeXpress and System.Drawing.BitmapProgram.cs
using System;
using System.Drawing;
using Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSdk;
namespace MyProject
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
BarcodeXpress barcodeXpress = new BarcodeXpress();
System.Drawing.Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap("barcode.bmp");
}
}
}
6. Pass this bitmap to Barcode Xpress and access the returned resultsProgram.cs
…
namespace MyProject
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
BarcodeXpress barcodeXpress = new BarcodeXpress();
System.Drawing.Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap("barcode.bmp");
Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSdk.Result[] results = barcodeXpress.reader.Analyze(bitmap);
if (results.Length > 0)
{
foreach (Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSdk.Result result in results)
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} : {1}", result.BarcodeType.ToString(), result.BarcodeValue);
}
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("No Barcodes Found.");
}
}
}
7. Finally, clean up your code by using the Dispose() methodProgram.cs
…
namespace MyProject
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
BarcodeXpress barcodeXpress = new BarcodeXpress();
System.Drawing.Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap("barcode.bmp");
Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSdk.Result[] results = barcodeXpress.reader.Analyze(bitmap);
if (results.Length > 0)
{
foreach (Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSdk.Result result in results)
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} : {1}", result.BarcodeType.ToString(), result.BarcodeValue);
}
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("No Barcodes Found.");
}
barcodeXpress.Dispose();
}
}Ongoing Improvements
Barcode Xpress isn’t a new offering — it’s been part of the Accusoft SDK lineup for more than 15 years. However, John Reynolds, Principal Engineer for Barcode Xpress, recently took a look at the code to improve its functionality. In his whitepaper, Refactoring Legacy Code for Speed in Barcode Xpress, he found that when repeatedly scanning a barcode in a particular direction, the count length of black/white runs in the same direction.
As a result, continually calculating the mask and data pointers for each coordinate is cumbersome, but also allows for potential shortcuts, such as keeping a running tally of the mask across the image. Applied in depth, this and other code legacy code changes have helped improve 1D barcode analysis times from 5% to 60%, depending on the image.
Barcode Xpress offers comprehensive code recognition that’s easy to implement and customize, while ongoing improvements help streamline SDK deployment, enhance operational speed, and empower software engineers in various markets. Discover the benefits of Barcode Xpress. Download a free trial or try an online demo today.
Barcode Xpress and ImageGear .NET. Barcode Xpress is a leading barcode reading SDK. While it supports a variety of image formats, Barcode Xpress works with ImageGear to support even more obscure image formats. For example, Barcode Xpress does not support reading barcodes on PDFs. Combined with ImageGear, developers can support a myriad of image formats and PDFs. With Barcode Xpress & ImageGear working together, developers can integrate a barcode reader that can detect barcodes on almost any kind of document.
Barcode Xpress accepts images in multiple different object types, such as System.Drawing.Bitmap. Using the method ImGearFileFormats.ExportPageToBitmap we can easily take any image that ImageGear supports and export it to a System.Drawing.Bitmap object that we can then pass to Barcode Xpress. So, only a tiny amount of code is required to recognize barcodes with ImageGear .NET and Barcode Xpress. Below, we’ll show various ways to pass different types of images and documents to Barcode Xpress.
Image:
// Load the image into the page.
ImGearPage imGearPage = ImGearFileFormats.LoadPage(stream, 0);
// Export the image to a bitmap and pass that bitmap to Barcode Xpress
Result[] results = barcodeXpress.reader.Analyze(ImGearFileFormats.ExportPageToBitmap(imGearPage));
PDF:
We need slightly more code for a PDF. First, we specify a page number when calling LoadPage. Second, we must dispose of the ImGearPage object after we’re done with it.
// Load the specified page of the PDF as an ImGearPage object
ImGearPage imGearPDFPage = ImGearFileFormats.LoadPage(stream, pageNumber);
// Export the image to a bitmap and pass that bitmap to Barcode Xpress
Result[] results = barcodeXpress.reader.Analyze(ImGearFileFormats.ExportPageToBitmap(imGearPDFPage));
(imGearPDFPage as IDisposable).Dispose();
Now that we’ve explained the most important part, we’ll show you a simple console app that recognizes barcodes on a PDF using the method above.
The code below assumes you’ve installed an evaluation or development license for both Barcode Xpress and ImageGear .NET.
using System;
using System.IO;
using Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSdk;
using ImageGear.Core;
using ImageGear.Evaluation;
using ImageGear.Formats;
using ImageGear.Formats.PDF;
namespace BXandIGDotNet
{
class Program
{
static int pageNumber = 0;
static string fileName = @"Path/To/Your/PDF..pdf";
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// Initialize evaluation license.
ImGearEvaluationManager.Initialize();
// Initialize common formats.
ImGearCommonFormats.Initialize();
// Add support for PDF and PS files.
ImGearFileFormats.Filters.Insert(0, ImGearPDF.CreatePDFFormat());
ImGearFileFormats.Filters.Insert(0, ImGearPDF.CreatePSFormat());
ImGearPDF.Initialize();
using (FileStream stream = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))
using (BarcodeXpress barcodeXpress = new BarcodeXpress())
{
// Load the specified page of the PDF as an ImGearPage object
ImGearPage imGearPDFPage = ImGearFileFormats.LoadPage(stream, pageNumber);
// Export the image to a bitmap and pass that bitmap to Barcode Xpress
Result[] results = barcodeXpress.reader.Analyze(ImGearFileFormats.ExportPageToBitmap(imGearPDFPage));
(imGearPDFPage as IDisposable).Dispose();
// Print the values of every barcode detected.
for (int i = 0; i < results.Length; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine("#" + i.ToString() + " Value: " + results[i].BarcodeValue);
}
Console.ReadKey();
}
}
}
}
Using Barcode Xpress and ImageGear in Other Languages & Linux
You can also use Barcode Xpress and ImageGear together outside of the .NET framework. Barcode Xpress supports several different programming languages and frameworks including .NET Core, Java, NodeJS, Python, C, and C++. All of which can be used on Linux.
ImageGear for C/C++ also supports Linux. Barcode Xpress Linux, which is a C/C++ library, ships with a sample called “ReadBarcodesIG”, that shows how to integrate Barcode Xpress Linux and ImageGear for C/C++. You can find the sample code after downloading our SDK here! For more information on Barcode Xpress, visit our Developer Resources page on the website. In addition, you can also find more information about ImageGear .NET on its respective Developer Resources page as well.
Post-secondary schools look very different this year as colleges and universities embrace both blended learning and online-only approaches to content delivery and engagement. But this isn’t a one-off operation. Even as pandemic pressures ease, the shift to distance learning as the de facto solution for many students won’t disappear. As a result, it’s critical for schools to develop and deploy learning management systems (LMSs) that both meet current needs and ensure they’re capable of keeping up with educational evolution. But what does this look like in practice? How do developers and team leaders build fully-functional LMS solutions that empower student success without breaking the bank?
Learning Management Systems (LMS) Challenges
When schools first made the shift to distance learning directives, speed was of the essence. While students were barred from campus for safety reasons, they’d paid for a full semester of instruction, and schools needed to deliver. As a result, patchwork programs became commonplace. Colleges and universities combined existing education software with video conferencing and collaboration tools to create “good enough” learning models that got them through to summer break. Despite best educational efforts, however, some students still went after schools with lawsuits, alleging that the quality of instruction didn’t align with tuition totals.
So it’s no surprise that as fall semesters kick off, students aren’t willing to put up with learning management systems that barely make the grade. They want full-featured distance learning that helps them engage with instructors and connect with new content no matter how, where, or when they access campus networks.
As a result, development teams can’t simply correct for current COVID conditions. Instead, they need to create systems that deliver both blended and purely online interactions, and have the power to ensure students that choose to continue with digital-first learning can still stay connected even after returns to campus become commonplace.
How to Create a Functional LMS Framework
So what does a fully-functional LMS framework look like in practice? Six features are critical for ongoing success. Let’s explore how these features can enhance your learning management system and set your end-users up for success in the classroom and at home:
Diverse Document Viewing
As schools make the shift to distance learning, the ability to view multiple document types is critical for long-term LMS success. From standard Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to more diverse image types — such as those used in medical educational programming or manufacturing courses — students and instructors need the ability to both send and view diverse document types on-demand.
While both free and paid solutions for viewing exist outside LMS ecosystems, choosing this route creates two potential problems. Students with diverse technological and economic backgrounds may face challenges in finding and using these tools, and data security may be compromised. This is especially critical as schools handle greater volumes of students’ personal and financial information. If document viewing happens outside internal systems, private concerns become paramount.
In-Depth Annotations
With students now submitting assignments and exams via educational software, viewing isn’t enough. Staff also need the ability to annotate assets as they arrive. Here, professors and teaching assistants are best-served by built-in tools that allow them to quickly redline papers or projects, add comments, highlight key passages, and quickly markup documents with specific instructions or corrections.
Without this ability, staff have two equally unappealing choices. They can either print out, manually correct, and then re-scan documents, or send all comments as separate email attachments. Both are problematic, since they limit the ability of students and teachers to easily interact with the same document.
Comprehensive Conversion
File conversion is critical for effective learning management systems (LMSs). Specifically, schools need ways to quickly convert multiple document types into single, searchable PDFs. Not only do PDFs offer the ability to control who can edit, view, or comment on papers or exams, they make it easy for teachers to quickly find specific content. The permissions-based nature of PDFs makes them ideal for post-secondary applications and a must-have for any education software solution.
Cutting-Edge OCR and ICR
Optical character recognition and intelligent character recognition also forms a key part of distance learning directives. With some students still more comfortable with hand-written hard copies and some classes that require students to show specific work, OCR can help bridge the gap between form and function. By integrating tools with the ability to recognize and convert multiple character types and sets, schools are better equipped to deal with any document type. Search is also bolstered by cutting-edge OCR; instead of forcing staff to manually examine documents for key data, OCR empowers digital discovery.
Complete Data Capture
Forms are a fundamental part of university and college life — but the myriad of digital documents can quickly overwhelm legacy education software. Integrating tools with robust form-field detection allow schools and staff to streamline the process of complete data capture, both increasing the speed of information processing and reducing the potential for human error.
Barcode Benefits
As campuses shift to hybrid learning models, students occupy two worlds, both physical and digital. But this duality introduces complexity when it comes to tracking who’s on campus, when, and why. These are currently key metrics for schools looking to keep students safe in the era of social distancing.
By deploying full-featured barcode scanning solutions as part of LMS frameworks, colleges and universities can get ahead of this complexity curve. From scanning ID cards to take attendance and track resource use to using barcodes as no-contact purchase points or metric measurements for ongoing analytics, barcode solutions are an integral part of LMS solutions.
Automation Advantages
The sheer volume of digital documents now generated and handled by post-secondary schools poses the problem of practicality. Teachers and administrators simply don’t have time to evaluate and enter data at scale and speed while also ensuring accuracy. By automating key processes including document conversion, capture, and character recognition, schools can reduce the time required to process documents, leaving more room for student engagement.
Building an LMS Product for Teachers & Students
The bottom line for LMS solutions? If they don’t work for end-users, they won’t work for the broader school system as a whole. Gone are the days of invisible IT infrastructure. Now, students and staff alike are school stakeholders with evolving expectations around technology.
By deploying distance learning solutions that prioritize end-user outcomes with enhanced document viewing, editing, data capture, and automation, developers can create LMS tools capable of both solving immediate issues and offering sustained student success over time. Learn more about these functionality integrations for your learning management system at accusoft.com/products.
College and university will look very different this fall. While some schools are making the leap back to on-campus learning, many are opting for hybrid educational models or hitting pause on the entire process to help limit COVID-19 concerns. No matter the academic approach, however, post-secondary schools share a common challenge, finding a distance learning system or learning management system (LMS) that has all the functionality they need without the cost. Teachers, schools, and universities are all scrambling to find a tool that fits their needs especially during a time when nothing is certain. That’s where learning management systems can help bridge the gap, by offering secure document collaboration with unique features like viewing, annotation, commenting, redaction, and more.
Current Collaboration Issues
As noted by the Harvard Business Review, while the last-decade uptake of massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered the potential to displace face-to-face learning, COVID’s effect on e-learning was nowhere near student and staff expectations. Post-secondary schools have been forced to deploy MOOC-like frameworks at a frantic pace as they attempt to minimize learning disruption and ensure students have access to critical educational resources.
It’s one thing to implement collaborative and communicative solutions — it’s another to ensure these deployments are efficient and effective. While Zoom calls, text chats, and email chains offer some ability for staff and students to connect, they’re not enough in isolation. As a result, schools now face three key collaboration challenges:
- Enhancing Student Engagement — If students aren’t engaged, success isn’t possible. Schools need learning management systems that simplify engagement initiatives.
- Ensuring Staff Efficacy — If staff spend all their time managing documents, they sacrifice student connection. Simplified document viewing, conversion, and editing tools help streamline this process and improve student outcomes.
- Expanding Solution Scope — As e-learning becomes common practice, schools need to ramp up solution scope. Here, process automation tools are critical to bridge the digital divide.
Potential Platform Pitfalls
While initial shifts to online and blended learning were given a measure of leeway as schools struggled to cope with the emerging impacts of a global pandemic, students and staff now want focused, functional online learning tools.
As noted by Inside Higher Ed, for example, while students are willing to be flexible, they also want assurances that their education will include regular communication opportunities with staff and classmates, and won’t sacrifice their career potential at the expense of an untested, rapidly-evolving educational model. Academic staff, meanwhile, need the ability to both engage with students and evaluate their work at a distance to ensure at-home learners enjoy the same advantages as their on-campus counterparts.
Here, digital platforms offer both promise and potential pitfalls. For example, if document management tools can’t offer the flexibility and functionality required to easily convert, view, and edit multiple file types, time is wasted for both staff and students. Customization is also critical, since every school has specific processes around document formatting, grading, and user access.
In addition, concerns exist for schools making at least a partial return to on-site education. As student numbers ramp up, campuses must reduce the potential risk of virus transmission by eliminating as many common touch points as possible. Here, barcoded student ID cards already used by many schools offer built-in practical potential — but only if the right infrastructure exists to support these solutions at scale.
The Learning Management System Answer
So how do universities and colleges support both hybrid and entirely e-learning approaches? It all comes down to content management — the combination of key solutions and services to both empower student success and reduce staff frustration. For post-secondary schools, essential tools include:
- On-Demand Document Viewing — With students now required to submit work electronically for assessment and evaluation, instructors and administrators need on-demand document tools that let them easily view, add comments, and insert redactions across multiple file types.
- Comprehensive File Conversion — To help standardize document management and storage, comprehensive file conversion is critical. By converting multiple file formats into searchable, scalable PDFs, schools can unify document management and ensure edits are only possible with specific permissions.
- End-to-End Document Automation — The sheer volume of information now processed by post-secondary schools — from organizational sign-up forms and healthcare waivers to loan applications and contact tracing documents — demands end-to-end document automation that ensures all forms are routed through the same, secure process for simplified security and storage.
- Superior Barcode Support — Barcodes not only help schools manage physical resources such as books, computers, and lab equipment but can also be leveraged on ID cards to support no-contact transactions in bookstores, food service establishments, and other campus facilities. As a result, schools need superior barcode support capable of quickly reading codes — even if they’ve been damaged or worn down thanks to continuous student use.
Blended learning strategies will remain part of post-secondary life for the foreseeable future. As a result, it’s critical to bolster both student and staff success with learning management solutions and distance learning systems capable of delivering both on-campus and off-site collaboration, communication, and connection. If you are looking to enhance your current learning management system or create an application that can help educators during these challenging times, contact us for a free consultation.
The insurance market is booming. As noted by research firm Deloitte, the property and casualty (P&C) sector saw a massive income uptick in 2018 and steady growth last year that’s predicted to carry forward through 2020. To help manage the influx of new clients and handle more claims, many firms are spending on insurance technology (insurtech) — digital services and solutions that make it possible to reduce error rates and enhance operational efficiency. InsurTech SDKs are important components of this transformation.
Both in-house insurtech solutions and third-party platforms often excel in specific areas but come up short in others, putting insurance firms at risk of writing off potential gains. While solution switching and ground-floor rebuilds offer one route to success, there’s another option that’s more custom to your business needs: software development kits (SDKs). Here’s a look at three top SDKs that offer customized functionality potential.
FormSuite for Structured Forms: Solving for Data Capture
Time is money. The faster insurance companies accurately complete and file documents, the greater their revenue potential. And as noted by KPMG, the need for speed is more pressing than ever. Many insurance sectors have seen substantial increases in both claims and new applications as the COVID-19 crisis evolves.
As a result, accurate and agile forms processing is critical to keep up with demand. If current insurance software can’t quickly capture forms data, recognize standard form fields, and let users easily create standard form libraries, policy processing falls behind.
FormSuite for Structured Forms makes it easy for developers to build in form identification and data capture that includes comprehensive form field detection with OCR, ICR, and OMR functionality and the ability to automatically identify scanned forms and match them to existing templates.
ImageGear for .NET and C/C++: Simplifying Conversion
Conversion is critical for insurance firms. Depending on the type and complexity of insurance claims, companies are often dealing with everything from Word documents for initial client assessments and .GIF or .JPG images of existing damage to contractor-specific PDFs or spreadsheets that detail necessary materials, time, and labor costs. The result? A mash-up of multiple file types that forces adjusters to spend valuable time searching for specific data instead of helping clients get their claims process up and running. This makes it difficult to recognize value from emerging digital initiatives.
Accusoft’s ImageGear for .NET and ImageGear for C/C++ empower developers to integrate enterprise-class file viewing, annotation, conversion, and image processing functions into existing applications, allowing staff to both quickly collaborate on key tasks and find essential data across a single, easy-to-search document.
ImageGear: Streamlining PDF Capabilities
While insurance technology offers substantive opportunities for end-users to capture, convert, and retain data, this technology can also come with the challenge of increased complexity. According to recent research from PWC, for example, firms looking to capitalize on insurtech potential must be prepared to rapidly develop new product offerings and embrace the expectations.
As a result, companies need applications that streamline current functions and allow them to focus on creating cutting-edge solutions. For example, PDF is a file format that is still used by enterprises worldwide to maintain document format consistency and maximize security. When it comes to converting multiple files into a PDF, software can be expensive and introduce data security issues.
This can all be solved with an SDK like ImageGear, which makes it possible to integrate the total PDF package into any document management application, both reducing overall complexity and freeing up time for staff to work on new insurance initiatives.
Insurtech forms the framework of functional futures in policy applications, claims processing, and compliance reporting, but existing software systems may not provide the complete capability set companies need to make the most of digital deployments. These top SDKs offer insurance IT teams the ability to integrate key services, improve speed, and boost security at scale. Learn more about Accusoft’s SDKs at www.accusoft.com/products.
Companies have a love/hate relationship with PDFs. While Adobe’s portable file format has been around for decades and remains one of the most popular document types available, some of its best features are overshadowed by frustration around conversion. Faced with a barrage of read-only PDF files or looking for ways to ensure the integrity of critical document data, you can spend significant time and effort searching for the ideal PDF converter application. This is particularly true when trying to convert Excel to PDF.
In some cases, this means ignoring IT best practices to leverage web-based “convert PDF free” tools that offer the benefit of speed, but could introduce potential security risk. In others, you might opt for large-scale document solutions that make the process of PDF conversion cumbersome and complex.
As noted by recent research from Deloitte, shifting market trends make both approaches problematic. Consider converting a familiar spreadsheet format — Excel — into PDF. What should be a simple task is often torturous and time-consuming and can significantly impact staff productivity. Let’s break down this situation further. In this blog, we’ll explore the operational impact of PDFs, consider the case for conversion, assess the spreadsheet-specific situation, and offer a step-by-step solution for potential PDF permutations.
The History of the PDF
- A quick search turns up multiple articles for and against the use of PDFs for business documents. Detractors cite the sometimes cumbersome process of converting and modifying this format, while electronic evangelists focus on the consistency of content across PDF files. To understand the impact of PDFs, let’s take a quick historical detour. First developed in 1991 by Adobe co-founder Dr. John Warnock, the Camelot Project focused on document consistency across user, location, and device. By 1992, Camelot became PDF and introduced two key features that keep it front-and-center for businesses:
- Preservation — PDFs are designed to preserve all data in the original file in its original format. As a result, any content — from text to graphics to spreadsheets — remains consistent when converted to PDF.
- Standardization — Not only do PDFs meet ISO 32000 standards for electronic document exchange, the format also includes specialty standards such as PDF/A for archiving, PDF/X for printing and PDF/E for engineering.
The Case for Conversion
While preservation and standardization speak to the benefits of PDF creation, why do so many companies prioritize conversion? First is the read-only nature of basic PDF files. Consider documents that contain customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) or employees’ HR data. Demands for intra-company interoperability mean these documents are often widely distributed across multiple departments and even outside the organization.
Storage is also a key consideration. While many files — including Excel spreadsheets — can quickly balloon in size as data volumes increase, compression comes standard with PDFs. This permits greater storage with a smaller footprint to help maximize the capacity of local storage infrastructure.
The Situation with Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets offer a specific situation for PDF conversion. With spreadsheets often the standard format for financial reporting and offering critical functionality for structured data analysis, Excel files are everywhere. The challenge? Ensuring the right people can access the right data at the right time — with the right context. Consider spreadsheets sent from a desktop to a mobile device that isn’t equipped with the same office software. What appears as tidy rows and columns on a computer monitor may be a contextually convoluted mess on mobile devices, forcing you to work against existing formats rather than finding common function.
Excel to PDF conversion offers three benefits to help solve the spreadsheet situation:
- Format Persistence — From standard spreadsheets to charts and graphs, the original format of Excel files is maintained in PDF. As a result, recipients don’t need specific office software to read Excel documents — in-app or online PDF readers are the only requirement.
- Content Curation — With the right PDF conversion tools, staff can easily choose what to share and how to share it. From converting entire documents to specific pages, making comments, or adding redactions, sharing is secure and simple.
- Password Protection — Speaking of security, PDFs also permit password protection for both access and editing. This both reduces the risk of unintended access and ensures that only authorized personnel can alter spreadsheet data.
The Market for Modification
Given the popularity of PDFs and the potential benefits of effective conversion, it’s no surprise that the market for modification is rapidly diversifying. From lightweight applications that allow users to convert PDFs for free to online PDF converters, there are now multiple options to make the move from spreadsheet files to portable document formats. The challenge? Finding your best fit. For example, while free online tools offer the benefit of quick conversion, they introduce potential security issues if spreadsheets are converted outside the confines of local networks.
Robust and reliable options from well-known providers, meanwhile, offer ways to maximize security without losing speed. Solutions like Accusoft’s ImageGear integrates alongside your existing applications, allowing document conversion under the auspices of local networks, while the PrizmDoc Cloud Conversion API lets you leverage the power of cloud resources customized to meet your needs. Even better? Start converting PDFs for free right now with an ImageGear trial or 300 free transactions in the Accusoft Cloud.
A Step-by-Step Guide: How to Convert an Excel File to PDF
Ready to start converting spreadsheets with us? It’s easy. If you’re using the PrizmDoc Cloud Conversion API, easy is the operative word. Simply select your source format, pick the pages you want to convert, and then define your destination format. Need pages 1-5 of your XLS document in a PDF? No problem. Looking to merge multiple pages into a single document? We’ve got you covered.
If SDKs are more your style, there’s a simple, step-by-step process to convert Excel files into PDFs:
Step 1: Create an instance of Microsoft Excel format after initializing ImageGear.NET
In C#:
ImGearFileFormats.Filters.Add(ImGearOffice.CreateExcelFormat());
Step 2: Modify the open dialog box to accept *.xlsx and *.xls extensions.
In C#
// After installation make sure you are including the following using statements
using ImageGear.Formats.PDF;
using ImageGear.Formats;
using ImageGear.Formats.Office;
using ImageGear.Core;
using System.IO;
using ImageGear.Evaluation;
// If you are evaluating our product, initialize the evaluation license
ImGearEvaluationManager.Initialize();
// After some initializations, load the necessary ImGear filters to create an instance
// of Microsoft Word format for input and an instance of PDF format for output using
// code that looks like:
ImGearFileFormats.Filters.Add(ImGearOffice.CreateExcelFormat());
ImGearFileFormats.Filters.Add(ImGearPDF.CreatePDFFormat());
// Next, the PDF library requires its own initialization:
ImGearPDF.Initialize();
// Then, simply read in all pages of the Word document using the
// ImGearFileFormats.LoadDocument() method:
ImGearDocument igDocument;
using (FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(inputFileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))
{
igDocument = ImGearFileFormats.LoadDocument(fileStream);
}
// Finally, write out the document as PDF using the ImGearFileFormats.SaveDocument()
// method with the saving format set to ImGearSavingFormats.PDF and no special options:
using (FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(outputFileName, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.ReadWrite))
{
ImGearFileFormats.SaveDocument(igDocument, fileStream, 0, ImGearSavingModes.OVERWRITE, ImGearSavingFormats.PDF, null);
}
Ready to accelerate output and improve productivity? Keep conversion close to home with ImageGear, or opt for secure operational outsourcing with the PrizmDoc Cloud Conversion API.
PDFs are everywhere. Vice calls them “the world’s most important file format,” and that’s not far off the mark. The sheer number of documents converted to, from, and often back to PDFs is astounding. The hard truth? They’re also frustrating to work with. Start a Google search with the word “convert” and three of the top five results involve PDFs.
While this portable document format lives up to its namesake by making it easy for users to attach and send documents across their organizations, PDFs often run into problems when it comes to conversion, collaboration, and communication. While many tools offer piecemeal PDF functionality, they lack a complete cadre of critical capabilities, in turn forcing software engineers to use multiple software solutions for seemingly simple tasks.
ImageGear offers a different take on the standard software development kit (SDK) designed to help developers maximize their PDF potential. Here’s how it works.
The Value of PDF Conversion
While PDF conversion is one of the top sought-after functionalities, there’s another area that’s often overlooked: modifying the characteristics of PDFs on-screen. With companies now handling PDFs from multiple sources that may include everything from computer-generated form data to handwritten information and images, it’s no surprise that staff encounter a wide variety of viewing issues.
ImageGear PDF helps solve these problems by allowing users to call the shots on PDF content at scale with features such as:
- Conversion
- Metadata Management
- Content and Font Editing
- Text Extraction
- PDF Watermarking
- Container, Dictionary, and Layer Creation
- 3D Asset Modification
ImageGear PDF also helps improve document processing with document cleanup and advanced optical character recognition (OCR). With the ability to encrypt and decrypt entire images (or part of an image), automatic ImageClean correction of white text blocks, borders, and inverted images, plus intelligent re-sizing, any PDF can be cleaned and made more readable for the user.
OCR support for almost any document type is also a benefit. This includes those produced on typewriters, dot-matrix printers, ink-jet printers, laser printers, and photocopied, scanned, and faxed documents. ImageGear PDF helps users control and customize multiple PDF variables, making it a fully functional PDF conversion solution for your application.
PDF Pain Points
One of the biggest PDF frustrations? The inability to break apart and combine PDF documents. Let’s imagine you have a massive legal PDF or in-depth medical file. In these circumstances, professionals only need a portion of the PDF, but without the right tools they’re stuck sending entire files when all they need is a single page. In other cases, employees might have a host of related PDFs that are part of the same project, but can’t be easily combined to save space and time.
ImageGear PDF has you covered with the ability to easily delete or insert PDF pages, render pages in a single PDF, split a PDF, merge two or more PDFs into a single file, or even merge specific pages from two or more PDFs into a single PDF. This not only makes a massive difference in time spent working with PDF documents, it helps reduce unnecessary storage and transmission of multiple files.
Convert PDF: Multiple File Formats for Conversion
Conversion is critical for PDF success. Instead of creating complexity by forcing end-users to stick with original file formats, implementing an SDK with cutting-edge conversion empowers corporate consistency and saves on storage space. ImageGear PDF supports a host of common file formats for conversion including Microsoft Office, JPEG 2000, CAD, and SVG.
Of course, no feature forward PDF framework is complete without robust annotation, redaction, and commenting capabilities. These features make it easy for other users to see exactly what’s been changed, when, and why, along with providing a critical, auditable paper trail to meet evolving compliance and regulatory standards.
PDF Functionality for Your Application
Best of all, ImageGear isn’t designed to replace your current software, but integrate alongside existing workflows. Rather than adding another application to already-overloaded IT arsenals, straightforward SDK integration means everything happens within your own application, making it easy for everyone to find exactly what they’re looking for within familiar territory. Need help jumpstarting your SDK deployment? Check out our full list of ImageGear .NET samples for ASP.NET, CAD, OCR support, and more.
PDFs remain eternally popular and continually frustrating. Solve for document viewing, split and merge, and conversion issues and streamline employee efforts with ImageGear.
The COVID-19 crisis has permanently changed the way banks do business. While many financial firms were already shifting away from brick-and-mortar branches toward both mobile and digital alternatives, pervasive pandemic priorities required a rapid shift in physical presence — forcing companies to rapidly react with remote work alternatives.
Some — such as JPMorgan — were already prepping for potential shifts in early March, deploying a pilot project that saw 10% of its 125,000 employees working from home. Banks like BMO, meanwhile, have embraced the new normal. The company says that around 36,000 staff members may permanently split their time between home and corporate offices.
While this focus on employee efficacy and engagement is critical, productive people aren’t the only element of remote work success. Security and speed are two of the qualities that consumers now expect across all key banking functions, and firms must prioritize digital processes that streamline these processes without compromising financial requirements.
But what does this look like in practice? How do organizations handle document management, process automation, and employee collaboration at a distance — without breaking the bank?
Facing Financial Frustrations
When work-from-home went from “maybe” to mandate, Deutsche Bank found itself racing to keep up. With just a few thousand out of its 90,000-strong workforce already working remotely, the firm was under pressure to scale capabilities quickly — from reimbursing staff for device purchase to rolling out video conferencing tools for more than 50,000 employees in less than two weeks, the bank has been under pressure to deliver remote work processes that deliver both continuity and compliance.
With finance firms historically lagging on technology adoption, however, this presents a significant problem. While cloud-based communication and collaboration tools are now commonplace — and can be readily adapted to work-from-home environments — the tools and tech necessary to underpin key financial functions are often tied to in-house server stacks and legacy applications.
This creates a digital disconnect. While staff may have access to corporate networks, many of the secure document management and financial processing solutions they need to complete day-to-day operations simply weren’t designed to operate at a distance. Security accounts for part of this separation — regulatory control is critical for banks to ensure client privacy — but many banks have also focused on familiarity over functionality, adopting a “good enough” approach to cumbersome, on-site applications. As a result, firms now face financial frustration across critical workflows, including:
- Consumer Vetting — How do banks effectively evaluate potential client credit histories and financial foundations to deliver tailored service recommendations at a distance? Insecure credit or personal data access could have significant regulatory and legal repercussions.
- Credit Approvals — Necessary credit checks require secure connections and the assurance that data won’t be subject to theft or man-in-the-middle attacks.
- Loan Applications — Bank staff must complete complex forms at a distance and firms must ensure work-from-home employees have the tools they need to handle multiple file formats.
- Account Management — Opening, closing, and modifying account information requires secure access and the ability to share key documents with specific data removed or redacted. Financial data shared outside secure workflows could result in compliance failures.
Solving for Scale
While many big banks are preparing partial return-to-work strategies or ramping up remote work solutions, smaller financial firms don’t have this luxury. The scale of large enterprises affords bigger budgets for IT management and deployment, giving them a deeper pool of resources to pull from when deciding how best to support staff and systems at a distance. From in-house IT teams capable of creating custom-built apps to legacy software solutions that can be updated to work with new collaboration tools, the scale of big banks offers a marked advantage.
For smaller financial firms with the bulk of their workforce already at home and a return to the office unlikely in the near future, fragmentation is the familiar framework. Many SMEs now use multiple document management applications to streamline key processes — but these apps don’t always work well together.
In the office, this doesn’t pose a significant problem — staff might lose time switching between software tools or moving data across digital divides — but at home, access and agility are both restricted. This becomes more complicated thanks to the rise of multi-cloud computing. While purpose-built cloud services empower small banks to keep pace with their enterprise counterparts, they introduce complexity as access points both multiply and diversify.
Driving Digital Dividends
To drive digital dividends at a distance, smaller banks are well-served by the implementation of advanced software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). These tools make it possible to integrate advanced functionality into existing apps without compromising the security of critical banking data. To deliver remote work potential, firms need SDKs capable of:
- Collaboration — Integrate key collaboration functions including in-app document viewing to enhance data security, easy annotation and commenting options to ensure all staff are on the same page for multi-step application or approval processes, and burn-in redaction to enhance the protection of client or corporate data.
- Conversion — As complex, compliance-heavy processes such as loan applications, credit evaluations, and financial investments move to remote, on-demand models, banks need no-touch data processing that makes it possible to view multiple file types — including familiar Word and Excel files along with more specialized image formats — and convert these files to PDF documents for easy search.
- Capture — Automated data capture, field recognition, and forms processing not only reduce the amount of time staff spend creating new forms and completing current applications, they also reduce the risk of human error. Enable your team to take complete control of document management functions with powerful character recognition, scanned document cleanup, and form identification — all from within your own application.
The “new normal” for banking relies on digital services. Advanced SDKs and APIs make it possible for firms to succeed over both time and distance by delivering comprehensive collaboration, conversion, and data capture without breaking the bank.