Accusoft's PrizmDoc is a powerful toolkit for displaying, converting, annotating, and processing documents. This example will demonstrate how to use the PrizmDoc Cloud Server to upload a HTML document and convert it to PDF format, using the Java programming language.

The HTML To PDF Conversion Process

Converting a file with PrizmDoc Server takes 4 distinct phases:

• Upload: We start by uploading the file to the PrizmDoc server (it's only stored temporarily while the conversion takes place). PrizmDoc will return a JSON file with the internal file ID and an affinity token, which we'll need for the next step.
• Convert: Next, we ask PrizmDoc to convert the uploaded file by using the file ID returned from the previous step. In this demo, we'll just be converting an HTML file to PDF – but PrizmDoc can also handle 50+ other file formats. PrizmDoc will now provide a ProcessID which we'll need for the next step.
• Status: We need to wait until the conversion process is complete before trying to download the file. The API provides the current status of the conversion so we can download the file once it is ready.
• Download: Once it's ready, we can now download the converted file.

Our Java program will reflect each of these steps through a class called PrizmDocConverter, that will interface with the PrizmDoc Cloud Server for each of the phases.

PreRequisites

For our code to work, we'll need a few things:

• A PrizmDoc API key. This code example uses the PrizmDoc cloud server – sign up for a free evaluation API key here.
• Java Development Kit. This code was written for Java SE Development Kit 8, available through Oracle.
• JSON reader: PrizmDoc server uses JSON ( https://www.json.org/ ) to transfer data between the client and server. For the demo, we'll be using the JSON Simple package. It can be downloaded and compiled through the Git project ( https://github.com/fangyidong/json-simple ), or if you're using Maven download it as a Maven project ( https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.googlecode.json-simple/json-simple ).
• PrizmDoc server API credentials – sign up for free. The API key is provided after login:

Take the API key, and place it into a file titled "config.json" at the root of your project:

Replace "{{ valid key here }}" with your API key, so if your API key is "ur7482378fjdau8fr784fjklasdf84", it will look like this:

Now we can code!

PrizmDocConverter Class

The PrizmDocConverter class uses 4 methods, corresponding to the 4 phases of PrizmDoc file conversion. The first part is to start up the PrizmDocConverter class.

Step 0: Loading the PrizmDocConverter Class

The first thing to do is to start up our PrizmDocConverter class. Using the Simple JSON package, we can get the apiKey field from our file:

We can now use our getAPIKey method to fire up the PrizmDocConverter class with the following call:

With the class started, we can start the next phase: Upload.

Step 1: File Upload

The PrizmDocConverter uses the method WorkFileUpload, that takes in the file name of the file we're uploading and processes it using the Prizmdoc Work Files API:

The Work Files API takes in an uploaded file, and temporarily stores it for processing, so it is not available to other users through the Portal interface. The URL for the PrizmDoc Cloud Server for uploading Work Files is:

The Work File API uses the POST command to upload the file, and requires the following headers:

• Acs-api-key: Our API key. (If using OAuth instead, then follow the Work File API instructions instead: http://help.accusoft.com/SAAS/pcc-for-acs/work-files.html#get-data ).
• Content-Type: This should be set to application/octet-stream since we're uploading bytes.

Start by setting up the URL and the HTTP headers. This example will use the HttpsURLConnection object to make the secure connections:

To upload the file, we have Java load the file into a FileInputStream, then read it through our HTTPSURLConnection:

When the file is uploaded, the Work Files API returns a JSON file with the details of the uploaded file:

To process this file after it's uploaded, we need the fileId and the affinityToken for the next phase: Convert.

Step 2: Convert

With the file on the PrizmDoc server, we can now issue a convert request through the Content Conversion API with our ContentConvert method:

We use the affinityToken and fieldId we received in the previous Upload step. The format based on the versions supported by the Content Conversion API ( http://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/v13.1/HTML/webframe.html#supported-file-formats.html ). In this case, we'll use "pdf" as our conversion target.

This requires we upload a JSON file with the fileId and what we want to convert it to:

Note that it's possible to request multiple files be converted, so if we were to upload a series of files, we could mass request conversions of all of them. With the fileId and affinityId extracted, we can start our request with the following URL for the Content Conversion API:

The following headers are required:

• Content-Type: The type of file, in this case "application/json"
• Accusoft-Affinity-Token: The Affinity Token we received from the Work File Upload
• Acs-api-key: The API key

To submit our request, we'll construct our JSON file based on the fileId and affinityId like this:

Now we can upload our JSON string for the conversion request:

Getting the JSON file is the same as our WorkFileUpload method, and with it we'll be able to download our converted file when it's ready. Here's the format of the JSON file our Content Conversion request provides:

The most important fields are the processId and the state, which we'll take up in the next stage, Status.

Step 3: Status

Until the conversion request is complete, we can't download the PDF file. To check the status, we use the same Content Conversion API call, with one difference: we use the processId as part of the URL:

This is very important – this is a GET command, but don't try to use processId as a variable. Your URI will not look like this:

It must look like this:

For example, a processID of ahidasf7894 would give use a URI of:

With that, let's look at our ConvertStatus method, which will query the PrizmDoc server via the Content Conversion API. This API will return another JSON file for us to parse:

This request is GET, with the following headers:

• Accusoft-Affinity-Token
• acs-api-key

Once again we get a JSON file back. There are three possible states:

• "processing" – The conversion is still in progress
• "complete" – the conversion is done, and we can download the converted file
• "error" – something has gone wrong with the conversion.

If the conversion is still processing, the "state" field will read "processing." When complete, the "state" field reads "complete". Our code puts in a loop that checks every 10 seconds, and when "state" is complete, we'll get a JSON file that contains a new fileId – the one we want to download. In the event of an error, our program will print out the JSON file and exit:

Here's an example of the JSON file we're looking for when the status is complete:

We want to extract the fileId from the "output" node. Now we can get to the last phrase: downloading our file.

Step 4: Download

We'll use the Work Files API again, only now we'll use our new fileId to put in a GET request with the following URL:

Our Work Files API to download will work via the following method:

Our affinityToken we have from the initial WorkFileUpload process, and the fileId we just received from our ContentConvertStatus. The last is the name of the file to write out. In this case, it will be a PDF file, so make sure you have the file name set correctly. Downloading a file is nearly an inversion of our original WorkFileUpload request:

And with that – the conversion process is complete.

The Conversion Example

In our sample program, the conversion is called via a command line with two arguments: the file to be uploaded, and the name of the file to write the converted file to. In this case, our PrizmDocConverter class is wrapped up in a .jar called "PrizmDocConverter.jar" that contains our PrizmDocConverter class, and we make sure our execution is linked to our JSON Simple API to read the JSON files:

Replace the json-simple-1.1.1.jar with your version. With this call, simple.html will be converted to simple.html.pdf. Want to try it out for yourself? Get your free API key then download our sample project and test our the Accusoft PrizmDoc conversion system.

Goal

Create a C# command line program that can read from existing Microsoft .docx (or .doc) documents and convert them to an Adobe PDF file

Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 7 or greater
• Microsoft Visual Studio
• Accusoft ImageGear .NET Developer Toolkit ( download free trial version here )

Programming Skill

Visual C# Intermediate Level

Need to turn Microsoft Word documents into PDFs? That's easy: Click File > Export > Create PDF/XPS > Publish. Want to do this 1000 times? Nah. The process is laborious if you have more than one document.

So let’s use C# to convert Docx or Doc files to PDF programmatically, so you can convert hundreds of documents in seconds.

Installing The Docx To PDF SDK (ImageGear)

First, we need to install a .NET SDK for handling the heavy lifting of the Word to PDF file conversion. The examples below will be using Microsoft Visual Studio 2017, but you can use previous versions back to Visual Studio 2010.

1. After you've installed Visual Studio to your liking, head over to the Accusoft ImageGear Developer Toolkit, and download the version for .NET. As we can see, there is support for Java, C, and C++ to fit your favorite development platform. Download the .NET installer.
2. Now you can run the Accusoft ImageGear Developer Toolkit installer. It will take a little bit as it downloads additional libraries.
3. OK – installation is done! Let's get to coding!

The ImageGear Developer Toolkit will put the files into the Public Documents of the file system, usually located at "C:\Users\Public\Documents\Accusoft". We'll be referring to them as we go along.

Setup Your Project

Once you have the toolkit installed, let's create a new C# project. For this project we'll just do a C# command line program so we dive right into the meat of the program, rather than needing to build a GUI with Windows Forms or WPF. But once you have it here, you can import this class into any other .NET project you like.

Just click on File, Project, and from the "Visual C#" list select Console App (.Net Framework):

To keep things simple we'll name the project "ImageGearConversionDemo."

Once the project is started in Visual Studio, we can use NuGet to add the reference files we need:

1. From within Visual Studio, click on Tools, NuGet Package Manager, then Manage NuGet Packages for Solution.
2. Make sure that the Package Source is set to nuget.org:
3. Select "Browse", then input "ImageGear" into the search window. You'll see different installation options depending on your project. Just to make things easier on us, select "Accusoft.ImageGear.All" to snag everything in one fell swoop. Or you can just specify the ones you need: ImageGear.Core, ImageGear.Evaluation, ImageGear.Formats, ImageGear.Formats.Office, & ImageGear.Formats.PDF. Click the project we want to apply it to, click "Install", and NuGet will take care of the details.
4. We can also see via the "Solutions Explorer" window that NuGet automatically added the references we need for the project:

Next we'll want to make sure that the components that do the document conversion are in place.

5. Click on Project, then Properties at the bottom. In the case of our example, that will be ImageGearConversionDemo. Click on Build. Make sure the Platform Target is x64, and the output directory is bin\Debug.
6. In the Toolkit install directory, in a standard install, is a folder C:\Users\Public\Documents\Accusoft\ImageGear.NET v23 64-bit\Bin\OfficeCore. Copy the entire folder to your Debug directory.

To make things easier, let's also set up our project properties for how the program is run. Click the Debug tab. Our final program is going to take two parameters:

7. The DOCX file we're going to convert.
8. The PDF file we're converting our DOCX file to.

You can set Command line arguments in Visual Studio by right clicking on your project in the Solutions Explorer, and going to Properties > Debug. Put in the two file names we'll be using. In our case, we will be using TheGreatestDocInTheWorld.docx, and outputting it to TheGreatestDocInTheWorld.pdf . Set those as your arguments, then make sure that the Working directory is in our Debug folder since that's where we're generating our program to.

If you want to add the ImageGear references to your program manually, you can use the instructions in the Accusoft ImageGear .NET documentation.

With that, now we can get to coding!

C# Sample Code

Here's our C# code for testing out ImageGear's Word to PDF conversion capabilities. It works with .docx and .doc files. You can copy/paste this code to get started (you’ll also need a free trial version of ImageGear), or keep scrolling for a walkthrough of the code.

Understanding The Word To PDF C# Code

The first part of the C# program is going to be importing our namespaces. If you used NuGet then you have all of the references you need. But the program needs then declared so they can be used. You can find more information on the API calls on the ImageGear User Guide, but here's the namespaces we'll need:

The ImageGear.Formats.Office and ImageGear.Formats.PDF are what's going to provide the bulk of the work here – they are what will be able to read from a docx, and write to a pdf file.

To handle the class conversions, we'll create a simple class and call it DocConverter. For this example, we're going to populate it with just one method – SaveDocXAsPdf:

SaveDocXAsPDF has two required arguments, and one optional one that we'll use in this example to control any console output. They're just there so we can trace the program steps as it goes through – by default, they won't display.

Before we do anything, we have to initialize the license. We'll be using an evaluation copy for this demonstration – but if you already have a license, follow the registration steps on the Accusoft ImageGear .NET instruction page ( http://help.accusoft.com/ImageGear-Net/v24.0/Windows/HTML/webframe.html#topic601.html ).

The next thing to do is to initialize the ImageGear File Format – in this case, Microsoft Word. In another example we'll show how to expand that to other file formats.

And while we're at it, we'll also initialize the ImageGear PDF object. This is an important step: Whenever we Initialize an ImageGear PDF object, it must be terminated later. Here's how it looks in our program:

ImGearPDF is not a typical C# object that self terminates, so make sure it's terminated.

Now – the actual reading of .doc/.docx files and writing of PDF files is pretty simple:

If we follow the code, the process is straightforward. Remember the "verbose" option will turn on and off the console outputs if you want the program to be quieter.

First, we create a file input stream, and a file output stream. The office document is loaded into the variable igDocument. We then set up the pdfOptions that will be used for exporting the file. And finally – write the file. If there is already a PDF file with the same name, we're going to overwrite it.

Let's see our C# Docx to Pdf code in action:

If we compare our new PDF to a PDF created using Microsoft Word's export option, the file created by ImageGear is smaller – 383 KB versus 504 KB. And the PDF file generated with ImageGear has kept all internal links and formatting.

Converting a DOCX to PDF is just scratching the surface of what ImageGear can do. ImageGear supports over 100 file formats for conversion, editing, compression, and more To find out more, check out the ImageGear overview page.

The use of electronic health records (EHR) systems has been steadily rising in the healthcare industry. A government study released in December 2016, in fact, showed that 87 percent of office-based physicians had implemented some form of an EHR system. This is a dramatic shift from 2004, when only 21 percent had done so, with most providers still relying largely upon paper records.

EHR systems, which focus broadly on a patient's entire medical history, are meant to be seen and managed by all care providers for a given patient. This approach is a departure from the earlier trend of using electronic medical records (EMR), which typically are more detail-oriented about the patient's history and meant to be maintained by one specific practice. The expanding use of EHR methodology, not surprisingly, has also occurred during a general industry shift in priority from services-based care to quality-based care, since the patient's entire treatment experience is now more easily compiled and analyzed.

Why security is critical for EHR systems

So if you've helped implement an EHR-based system for medical professionals, those numbers are probably very encouraging. But it's important to remember that with this freer movement of information come risk and responsibility. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and subsequent legislation, for instance, set stringent federal standards for the safeguarding of patient information.

Thus, if there's one word you need to keep in mind when planning EHR improvements it's this: security. But what should you do to guarantee a secure, authoritative patient data system, and how should you go about it?

A complex problem with a powerful solution

Accusoft's PrizmDoc document and image viewer API is a versatile toolkit for adding powerful features to EHR systems while meeting strict security requirements. It supports any programming language or platform along with displaying dozens of file types, and is continually being updated to meet the demands of a diverse customer base.

Here are three ways PrizmDoc is being used inside EHR and EMR systems to make management of patient documents easier and more efficient:

A complete digital records resource

The trend toward EHR is here to stay, and PrizmDoc is an indispensable tool for keeping up with the fast-changing medical industry. It creates a central repository for all patient forms, provides secure viewing of them and facilitates group work and discussion. It also features a highly intuitive user interface that patients and providers alike appreciate, and its search functionality is a huge help when high volumes of records are involved.

Let us help

We're always here to answer your questions about PrizmDoc and other products from our complete suite of document and imaging tools. Contact us here to learn more about how Accusoft can enhance any medical document management system, including the comprehensive upgrading your EHR system.

CAD drawings pose several unique challenges for document management. They require special software to view, and have several complexities (layers, 3D angles, lighting, etc.) that make converting them to basic image files complicated. With the right technology, though, these challenges can be easily overcome.

Here are 3 of the top challenges IT and document management professionals report facing, with 5 different solutions to these challenges.

What document management challenges does your organization face? Fill out the contact form below and one of our engineers will reach out to you.

Technology is simplifying communication between humans and computers. The old keyboard-and-mouse model has become antiquated for many uses, and even touch screens introduce inefficiencies to the process of entering and retrieving information. As multitasking has become the norm in both personal and professional life, a very pure simplicity – voice technology – is emerging as the new standard for managing devices in the home as well as the office.

The use of voice commands is a simple, natural way to control machines, freeing up the user's hands much like speakerphones, headsets and the popular Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers. Word recognition technology still isn't perfect and can lead to some unintended (and very funny) gaps in semantics, but most users are more than willing to accept the occasional misstep in exchange for the convenience of breaking away from the keyboard and screen while operating a device.

Who can voice technology help?

There are numerous examples of cases where this technology is useful, such as in presenting information. Years ago, a slide show presenter might use an assistant to manually advance through a display, typically, sequence of images or data. More recently, a Bluetooth controller with "Next" and "Previous" buttons could maneuver somewhat more smoothly through the slides. But voice commands take the interface to another level, freeing the presenter to interact more freely with the audience and possibly present more information in parallel.

Users reading instructions to perform a complex task can also benefit from the technology. Voice commands controlling a phone or tablet can help navigate through a PDF or Microsoft Word document detailing recipes, furniture assembly or even engine repair while leaving the operator's hands – and eyes – free to handle the job.

Portability is another key element in the use of voice commands. The ability to verbally control an application makes it much more accessible and convenient on the go, whether at a hospital, school or other public place where typing can be awkward and time-consuming. Retrieving maps, directions and contact information are all important tasks for mobile users that are simplified by voice functionality.

An entire generation, of course, is already accustomed to this technology, using it to handle everyday tasks without a second thought: "Siri, where's the nearest coffee shop?" "Alexa, play that song that goes 'Make a change, and break away.'" More and more devices facilitate the exchange of information by handling voice commands just like these, indulging the growing demand for automation.

Making the PrizmDoc viewer understand voice

We identified a number of use cases where voice support can be a huge help for anyone viewing information. The versatile PrizmDoc is a powerful tool for accessing a multitude of documents and images, and here we will detail the technical process of making it understand voice commands.

PrizmDoc allows multiple types of customization, and adding basic voice control is not too different from adding a custom button. For our purposes we are using Web Speech API to process voice data.

We will add a button which starts voice recognition in the viewer. When the button is pressed, the viewer will listen and process a few voice commands, such as scrolling, page navigation and adding annotations.

If the viewer cannot understand a command, it will indicate this with a red question mark in the voice recognition button.

Adding the button HTML

The bulk of the viewer markup is inside the file viewerTemplate.html; this includes all the toolbars and vertical slide-outs.

OS and browser requirements

This example was tested in the Chrome browser running Windows. See the "Browser Compatibility" section on Mozilla's developer site for more details on browser support.

A more complete viewer solution

PrizmDoc, compatible with all programming languages and platforms and able to display all major file formats, has established itself as the premier development toolkit for document and image viewing. Adding voice support to its user interface makes it easier to operate just as it saves time and trouble for developers and end users alike.

To learn more about PrizmDoc and its various uses in virtually unlimited industries, click here. To view demos of PrimzDoc's features, click here. To contact Accusoft with any questions or comments about this blog or its products for document and imaging solutions, click here.

In a world where automation is gradually taking hold of so many business processes, manual data entry is still alive and clicking. Companies in various industries - from schools to banks to hospitals - rely on the tedious process of employees entering information from forms into computer systems.

If your company still relies on manually entering form data, should you switch? Here are a few of the benefits of switching to automated data capture.

The 6 Step Process For Automated Data Capture

In this schematic, scanning a document is the first step in processing the form. The scanned form is then aligned with a template to match the image to form fields, and the data is read by an application that searches predefined areas on the form for specific fields. As shown in the diagram, optical character recognition (OCR) then converts the fields into searchable data.

For example, the information on a rental application, such as name, current address, employer and so on is digitized by the process and stored as a record in a data file. Users can then search for an applicant's name or any other relevant information - all without needing a data entry clerk to type out any forms.

Types Of Data That Can Be Captured

There are many types of information, of course, that can be automatically processed from forms, such as:

• Barcodes
• QR codes and other images
• Text
• Bubbles (OMR)
• Check data (MICR)
• Images
• Signatures
• Handwriting

With all these, the idea is the same: automation removes much of the potential for human error, saves money and makes the process scalable because it's so much faster than working purely by hand.

The automated process is not perfect, either, in the sense that it is only as reliable as the quality of the inputted data. If fields are not legible or the original form is damaged, the output will not be valid. A good data capture system will flag such situations which require human intervention.

Goal

Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 7 or greater
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 or greater
• Accusoft Barcode Xpress .NET

Programming Skill

Need to create a barcode generator and reader in VB.NET? Accusoft Barcode Xpress is a barcode generator and reader library that supports over 30 different types of barcodes, and can accurately read barcodes even when they are damaged or scanned at low resolution. In this tutorial we'll create a simple order shipping and receiving example to demonstrate creating and reading barcodes in VB.NET.

VB.NET Barcode Generator/ Reader Sample Code

Getting Your Project Set Up

Then Click on Extensions and select Accusoft Barcode Xpress 12 .Net.

In the code for your Visual Basic project, place the following commands to import the libraries into your code:

Getting Started with Data

Generating Barcodes In VB.NETData

To track shipments, we can generate barcodes that that would be attached to the shipping label.  With Barcode Xpress, that's a simple task. First, we'll have our program look through the shipping table and any orders that haven't been shipped (shipped is False), take the shippingOrder field and give it to our GenerateBarCodes function:

The GenerateBarCodes function leverages Barcode Xpress.  Barcode Xpress supports a plethora of barcode types – you can check them all out at http://help.accusoft.com/BarcodeXpress/v12.0/dotnet/webframe.html#Supported_Barcode_Types.html . For this example, we'll use the Code 39 standard to generate our barcodes.

Here's how we actually create our BarcodeExpress object and update the options:

What we've done here is create our BarcodeXpress object, set it to the Code39Barcode standard, and then set the barcode value to the current shippingOrder value.  All that's left is to generate the barcode image itself and save it to a file. After that, the files can be used however we want – print them out as labels, embed them in documents – whatever works best.  We can leverage the Visual Basic object System.Drawing.Bitmap to do that for us.

That's it!  A few lines of code, and when we call the GenerateBarCode function with a shippingOrder that equals A123456, here's the result:

In the case of our sample program, it takes a few milliseconds to generate the barcode files and be ready for shipping.  Our function returns a boolean value if it's successful, and our code then sets "shipped" to true and sets the date and time in our table of data.

Reading/Scanning Barcodes In VB.NET

So we've generated our barcodes to send out our shipments. But what about receiving them?  Using the same Barcode Xpress object, we can have the system scan in the barcodes, get the data from the barcode, look the order up in our table, then update the table to show the order was received and what time it occurred. Depending on how we receive the images will depend on your setup – but for this example we'll just manually set a couple of files to test it out.

Here's a simple example using one of the barcode files we generated:

Our program has a command line switch.  If you run it without any command line options, like this:

Then you'll just have the barcode files generated off of our table.  Run it like this, though:

Where "imagefile" is a bitmap image with our barcode inside (such as, for example, the "C266760.png).  We'll pick this up from our Main program like so:

Now we can scan our file with this command:

What we can do is generate an array of Accusoft.BarcodeXpressSdk.Result objects, then extract the values from there.  The function ReadBarCodes can be called via this method:

The function starts by taking the filename submitted to it, loading it into a Bitmap object, then using the same BarcodeXpress object. Only this time, instead of creating a barcode image, it can read from the bitmap image, and store the results into the Result object:

Scanning the barcode above will return an array with just one value in it – the barcode data for shipment C266760 from our example, and we can update our table of values to show this order was received and the date/time we scanned it:

But what if we have more than one barcode in our image, like this one:

Not only do we have multiple barcodes – but looks like someone slapped on one of them at an angle.  This is included in the sample as "received_002.jpg".

Angled barcodes?  Not a problem. In fact, we can test this by displaying the table before and after scanning the file:

Success!

Even the one that was at a different angle was detected accurately.  Barcode Xpress can handle scanning barcodes in a variety of standards and formats, from multiple angles and even when the image has been degraded.

Ready to get started?

Check out the Accusoft Barcode Xpress free trial at https://www.accusoft.com/products/barcode-xpress/overview/ and give it a try.  Not into Visual Basic or .Net?  That's fine – there are versions for Java, Linux and even your favorite mobile devices.

Goal

Create a command line program in C# that can read a CAD file (DWG, DXF, or DGN format), then use ImageGear .NET v24 to convert this file to a PDF file with either 2D image conversion or 3D images from the original CAD file.

Requirements

• C# development environment (Visual Studio used in this example)
• Accusoft ImageGear .NET v24 SDK

Computer-Aided Design To Portable Document Format

One of my favorite school projects was Build Your Own House. We were given an imaginary mortgage value, graph paper, and the task of building our dream house based on that budget. I agonized over where to place doors, and how to make sure there was enough room for them to open into my private office where I'd have a collection of Transformer and Teenage Ninja Turtles. Using a ruler, I marked off the dimensions of every room, how my kitchen would be, and because I was 10 years old at the time and knew I'd never marry a girl because girls are "yucky" at that age, I'd have just one big room with enough space for a Pac-Man machine in the corner.

Sadly, I never got my own Pac-Man machine. But the principles behind Computer-Aided Design (CAD) files and my old graphs of my house are the same – a way to represent on computer what my ruler and graph paper tried to. With CAD, you can represent everything from machinery to the skyscrapers. Every detail, from the smallest object to the largest structure, can be represented.

Odds are, though, not everyone has access to a CAD viewer. You want to show off that great new condo design to a prospective buyer, or automate the process of updating documentation based on the most current CAD designs. The best option would be to take your CAD files and convert them to PDF format, but without all the tedium of sitting at the computer to open and convert the files by hand.

This demonstration will show how to perform that same task using Accusoft ImageGear v24, which has built-in support for a variety of image files, PDF documents, and CAD file conversion. The sample code will be using C# as our base, but with the ImageGear .NET SDK any supported .NET language will work for you.

The sample code is below, and a code walkthrough will follow.

Prepping the Development Environment

Before we get started, we'll need to perform a few tasks.

Install Visual Studio

This demonstration uses Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, but ImageGear .NET will support previous versions.

Install ImageGear .Net SDK

An evaluation copy can be found here. As of this writing, the most current version is .NET v24, which adds support for CAD files as well as a plethora of other file formats.

The ImageGear .NET SDK installs by default under "C:\Users\Public\Documents\Accusoft\ImageGear.NET v24". We'll call this the INSTALL_DIRECTORY through the document. We'll be referring to this directory for some files we'll need in a moment.

Create Your Project

This demonstration shows how to construct a command line version. Fire up Visual Studio, create a New Project, and select C#, then "Console App." Give your project a name – we're going with "AutoCAD2PDF" here:

Once our project is created, we need some files from our ImageGear .NET SDK. Go into your ImageGear .NET SDK install directory and navigate to "INSTALL_DIRECTORY\Bin\x64" (or "INSTALL_DIRECTORY\Bin\x86 if you're still working in the 32-bit world). Copy all of these files into your Visual Studio project into the Debug directory, so if you named your project AutoCAD2PDF, you'll want to put these Accusoft resources files into "AutoCADto2DPDF\AutoCADto2DPDF\bin\Debug".

One other thing that will help us keep things organized. In the Debug directory, create two folders:

• Input: Place the CAD files to be converted in here.
• Output: The program will place the converted files into this directory.

Getting the Code Ready

We need to add in our ImageGear libraries into our project. We're going to put in the minimum ones to make our program work. In Visual Studio, go to the menu and select Project, then "Add Reference". Select Browse, then browse to the Debug directory where we copied the resource files and select the following DLL files:

• ImageGear24.Formats.Common.dll
• ImageGear24.Formats.Vector.dll
• ImageGear24.Core.dll
• ImageGear24.Evaluation.dll

Now it’s time to code.

Architecture of a Conversion

1. What is the CAD file to read from (supported file formats are DWG, DXF, and DGN)?
2. What will be the name of the file to write to (this program will verify that the file extension is .pdf)?
3. What version of PDF are we writing to (this program supports version 1.3 up to 1.7, with 1.7 being the default)?
4. Do we want to export the images as 2D or as 3D objects in our PDF file?

What’s in a NameSpace?

Let's set up our name spaces to add support for our various C# objects.  Add the following name spaces into the start of our CAD2PDF.cs file:

We'll focus on our main class first, where we get our parameters. Our main class is looking for four parameters we defined above: the CAD file to read, the PDF file to write to, what version of PDF (listed as "PDFv1_3", "PDFv1_4", and so on to "PDFv1_7"), and whether we want a "2D" or "3D". So a typical program call will look like this:

Here's how we set up our main function to track this. If we don't get these four arguments, the program will exit:

Before we go any further, we'll want to validate and make sure that everything will run right. Our function ValidateParameters will make sure that our input file exists, that we can write to our output files, and that both files are the proper format as far as file extensions for CAD and PDF:

Next, we want to set up the save options for our CAD to PDF conversion. All of these are stored in our function BuildPDFOptions, which takes our PDF version settings, whether it's going to be in 2D or 3D, and then puts them together in the ImageGear CADPDFSaveOptions object. It sets up the metadata for our PDF file, the dots per inch settings, and the background color. In this case, we're setting up the page background to be white. If you need more information on the various CADPDFSaveOptions settings, check out the ImageGear .NET documentation

If everything checks out, we'll use the real workhorse function, ExportCADtoPDF. This is the meat of the ImageGear experience. We'll take in our CADPDFSaveOptions, the inputFile and outputFile and run the conversion process:

Once the evaluation settings are complete, the conversion code very quick, so don't blink or you might miss something. First, we read the CAD file into a ImageGear ImGearCADPage object:

Well, that was simple enough. Now we just use our CADPDFSaveOptions settings, and write to our target file:

"That's it?," you may ask. That's it. There are other options you can pursue using Accusoft, such as which pages to export. But let's use an example. Here's a CAD rendering of a gripper arm-cute little thing:

You can get your own copy from AutoDesk here.

So how does it look when we run it through our program and bring it to a 2D PDF?

And here's the PDF rendering with a white background:

Let's have some fun. Go back into the BuildPDFOptions function and let's change the background from white:

To black:

And how does our converted PDF file look now?

The movie TRON would be so proud of this look.

Give the source code a try and play with it, and see if ImageGear meets your image editing and converting needs. Want to know more? Read the official documentation, try out the code samples, or feel free to contact us and see how we can meet your needs.

For companies of virtually all sizes and industries, using remote data centers to access software has grown dramatically in recent years. This steady adoption of "cloud-based" data solutions has become commonplace for any number of reasons, and represents a viable alternative to the traditional method of running applications locally.

Marketing research firm Clutch performed a 2017 survey of IT professionals at companies already using cloud computing. Their findings provided interesting insight: respondents listed security (both of data and physical assets) and increased organizational efficiency as the primary benefits of using the cloud. And 67 percent said they expected their investment in cloud technology to increase in the coming year.

Yet some organizations remain hesitant to consider using "the cloud," even though the concept – retrieving usable information from an external source – is really no different than using Google's servers to perform a basic web search. Fears persist about security, data integrity, and, of course, cost. Many companies might talk a good game about joining the trend, but often ultimately stick with what they know.

Are their concerns warranted? Below we'll consider several common preconceptions about cloud usage, and see how well they stand up to established facts in the real world.

Myth No. 1: Cloud usage is too expensive for my company

Some executives take a "Why should we pay a third party for server access when we have our own IT staff?" approach to the cloud issue, voicing obvious implicit concerns about cost. One problem with this mentality is that while most companies do have some sort of technical presence on staff, many greatly underestimate the necessary investment in hardware (servers, dedicated CPUs, etc.) to run all the software packages they and their applications need on a daily basis.

The most typical savings advantage in cloud usage is avoiding these sunken costs of buying and maintaining hardware (plus hiring the expert personnel required to oversee it) by outsourcing. This practice, often called SaaS (Software as a Service), simply entails enlisting a cloud services firm that handles the servers and everything else needed to provide applications online to a client company, all at the provider's location. Some diligent comparison shopping among them should reveal some legitimate alternatives that manage a balance between reputation and affordability.

One key when considering a cloud partner is understanding organizational needs. SaaS providers typically offer different packages based on level of use. A sensible approach early on would be to make conservative estimates of necessary transactions per billing period, then adjust as needed (as the company grows, for instance) to eventually enjoy economies of scale in use of the service.

Gartner, another prominent marketing research firm, reports that while CIOs indeed often encounter resistance from financial counterparts hesitant to incur the operating expenses associated with SaaS subscriptions, the long-term benefits of prudent cloud usage make the investment sensible.

Myth No. 2: Data security is a problem using the cloud

Another concern often voiced by organizations is the fear that sensitive data can be compromised by allowing a cloud services provider to access it. Financial institutions and governmental agencies, for instance, have an obvious responsibility to ensure the privacy of any information that may be processed off-site. While this was a more legitimate concern in the early, less refined days of cloud usage, the adaptation of ever-advancing technologies has made it less worrisome.

And though data security is still clearly an imperfect science, as evidenced by highly-publicized breaches in recent years, companies are finding that a hybrid approach of implementing their own measures in addition to those employed by cloud service providers has proven to be the best available safeguard for keeping information secure.

A study conducted by Clutch showed underscored this trend. While nearly two-thirds of IT professionals surveyed said that cloud security infrastructure systems were safer than those they administered themselves, a full 75 percent said they employed their own methods – most often data encryption – in addition to those used by their cloud providers. This synergy appears to be the preferred approach to data security in the cloud world, with results that clearly benefit client companies.

Myth No. 3: Cloud solutions lack standardization among providers

Most business executives aren't technical experts, and thus feel intimidated by the task of searching for the best SaaS solution for their firm's particular needs. One reason for this is that they're often confused by the claims of various cloud providers competing for their business. How are they supposed to analyze and compare technical specifications of these solutions when there's no established set of standards to use as a guide?

Thankfully, the rise in popularity of cloud usage has led to the emergence of resources (written by neutral third parties) to compare the often bewildering array of options available in the market. Industry authority InfoWorld, for instance, published this comprehensive price comparison piece that evaluates options from what it calls the "big three" of cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google) as well as IBM.

Sitepoint takes comparing the biggest providers several steps further with this research piece, using criteria such as processing value (based on volume of use), storage rates, content delivery networks (CDNs) and the proximity of data center locations to target markets. Still another comparison, from cloud management specialist Caylent, factors in security and monitoring protocols for better evaluating the same big three providers.

These examples should help make clear that the cloud world isn't as nebulous as it may seem. Competition from the biggest names in the tech world has forced providers to be as specific as possible about their various offerings, and organizations of all sizes are the beneficiaries.

Myth No. 4: Cloud providers are hard to find

Like the previous point, this preconception is based on the faulty assumption that little available information exists about SaaS options. As the rapidly-expanding cloud market suggests, providers are constantly finding prospective clients and letting them know about their offerings.

And it's not just the heavy hitters of the IT world hawking available cloud solutions. Technology trade magazine CRN listed its top 10 providers to watch for 2018, indicating that while there are predominant options in the SaaS space that will likely always draw a disproportionate share of business, there are also ample alternative options that can also be evaluated to find an ideal fit for a specific organization.

Myth No. 5: Cloud technical support is poor

Competition isn't just driving cloud service providers to spell out the features of their SaaS plans; it's making them refine their support practices in order to retain business. Clients regularly dealing with slow or nonexistent access to remote applications will obviously be receptive to finding new cloud solutions, and the proliferation of options in the SaaS world demands providers be dedicated to top-level support.

Google Cloud, for instance, responded to this need in 2017 by creating its Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team, responsible solely for keeping applications accessing its cloud space running. Forbes reports that CRE's approach to support is to charge clients based on response time needed, rather than how much the client is already spending on cloud usage, in an effort to create an advantage over Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

AWS has developed its own four-tier support plan as well, further suggesting that cloud providers sense the need for developing client trust that vital business operations will suffer minimally from outages. Any who fail to provide comparable commitment to support can't expect to stay competitive.

An important innovation to explore

Cloud computing isn't a difficult notion to grasp; it's a service used every day by a variety of businesses for a variety of reasons. There are costs and risks involved like with any other new venture, but as the studies cited above show, business leaders are increasingly turning to outsourcing at least a segment of their technology needs and are already seeing a substantial return on that investment.

As more and more companies embrace digitization of paper documents, they're looking for ways to minimize the virtual storage space necessary for these new files. They're already benefiting from increased office space and improved workflow efficiency, but they also need data compression techniques to make access to digital information quicker and less costly.

One standard method is mixed raster content compression (MRC), which greatly reduces the size of stored PDF documents. Since the vast majority of data being digitized and archived is in PDF format, MRC compression is an ideal tool for converting high volumes of paper documents into compressed, searchable files.
 

MRC: The basics

Mixed raster compression works by breaking down an image (typically a full page of a PDF document) into its various components: mostly text and color image files. This is done in order to utilize the most thorough compression algorithm available for each part of the page.

As a result, even though the color images are highly compressed into their core elements (background, color, grayscale, etc.) they retain vivid detail and can be displayed subsequently with essentially no loss of quality, and any text from the original page remains searchable.
 

Putting high-grade compression to use

A real estate firm, for instance, can use MRC compression to efficiently store a database of home listings, each with potentially dozens of color images and a searchable street address, with little to no compromise in file fidelity. Instead of relying on bulky hard copies that can be lost or become outdated, the realtor's IT specialists use optical character recognition (OCR) to create source PDF files and MRC compression to make those PDFs a fraction of their original size.

Consider these numbers: MRC can compress a 20 MB .TIFF color image file (which is part of a source PDF) to anywhere between 96 and 170 KB, based on the level of compression desired. This range suggests, of course, a tradeoff between file size and image quality, but is a significant reduction from the source image in any case – with differences in the displayed file barely discernible.

The most recent MRC tools make its integration into existing applications simple as well, usually involving just adding a few lines of code to these make such dramatic compression ratios a reality. For all the talk of companies creating fully digitized records archives, MRC compression is one technique that's making it more feasible than ever.
 

Let us help

If you'd like to learn more about mixed raster content compression, including how the newest version of our ImageGear.NET SDK features highly refined MRC functionality, contact us and our experts will get in touch. We're here to help developers make applications that put organizations on the forefront of digital content management.

Goal

Create a command line program in C# that can convert a PDF document into a series of images, one for each page of the document. The program will allow the user to select the start and end pages to convert, and what bitmap file format (JPEG, BMP, GIF, and PNG) to save in.

Requirements

• C# development environment (Visual Studio used in this example)
• Accusoft PDFXpress .Net SDK (download free evaluation copy here)

Accusoft's PDFXpress is a great tool for editing, annotating, and putting information into a PDF file or extracting it. But suppose you need to turn PDF pages into images for hosting on a web page. Something quick so you can create a gallery for people who just need that one page instead grabbing the entire PDF file.  

PDFXpress can do that, too. This sample program will create a command line tool in C# that will demonstrate the basic commands for using PDFXpress. This will allow a user to convert a PDF document into a series of image files, creating one file per page as a bitmap image specified by the user (BMP, JPEG, GIF, or PNG). A typical program run would be:

The flags "image format", "start page number", and "end page number" are all optional, and without them the program will default to creating a JPEG image of every page in the PDF file.

Prerequisites

You'll need a copy of the Accusoft PDFXpress.NET SDK. Copy the CMap and Font folders from the Support folder where PDFXpress was installed to a folder called ‘library’. The setup should look like this:

The PDF file will be in the same folder as the executable. If you want to dive right in, download the sample code.

For more explanation, continue reading to follow the code walkthrough.

Getting set up

In order to create the program, we'll be using Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition, and the PDFXpress.NET SDK kit. Previous versions of Visual Studio are also compatible with PDFXpress.

Once you have downloaded PDFXpress, create your project as a C# Console Application. In order to leverage the right name spaces, we need to edit our references (either by right clicking on "References in the Solution Explorer, or clicking "Project -> Add Reference".)

Select "Extensions", and make sure that "System.Drawing" and "Accusoft PDFXpress7.NET" are checked:

PDF to Image Code Walkthrough

To start, we need the following namespaces for our code to work properly:

In this case, the class "PDFXpressConverter" is used to hold our methods. To make sure things are set up right, we can load our initializing settings in the constructor:

This tells our PDFXpress object where the font and character mapping files are in the "library" folder (make sure to save a copy of Font and CMap into a folder called "library" with your executable).

Just to make sure our program exits cleanly, we'll also set up a deconstructor to clear out the PDFXpress object from memory:

We'll skip explaining the main function – all it really does is load up the settings of the file name, file format, start and end page to convert our PDF into images. Let's take a direct look into our conversion method, ConvertPDF2Image:

The first thing to do is load the PDF file into our PDFXpress object:

You may be asking: Why are we storing the result of adding the file to our PDFXpress object as an integer? In this case, "index" tracks the documents collection within our object – meaning you can store multiple PDFs into one PDFXpress object, each tracked by a different number.

Next we'll set up our rendering options. We'll keep this at a resolution of 300 x 300. Here's a neat tip – one of the rendering options allows for annotations to be captured as well. See more detail on the PDFXpress API documentation PDFXpress API documentation.

We're going to take a look at one piece of our member function that does error correction: If "pageEnd" is set to "-1", then it will go through all the pages. PDFXpress, once it loads a file, has a simple property for displaying the total number of pages:

Why set pageEnd to the last page minus one? The pages are listed with 0 being the first page, so if it's a 500 page document, the last page will be "499".

And finally, here's the part of the method that does the heavy lifting, taking our PDF document and saving each page in our range of pages as images:

A quick note: The "Progress(++pageIndex, totalPages);" is a simple method that displays the current page being rendered and how many pages are left to go.

That's how easy it is to use the PDFXpress SDK! One line of code takes an entire PDF page with all of the text, fonts, images and encapsulates it into a bitmap object.

Interested? Download the sample code and try it out for yourself!

In a previous blog post we discussed misconceptions that information professionals typically have about cloud computing. We went through some of the most common myths one by one, explaining why they're inaccurate and why, unfortunately, they persist even now among executives across various industries.

At Accusoft, we believe in the power of the cloud, and are committed to extending its functionality and flexibility to our customers. Let's break down some of the benefits that cloud computing can provide for you and your applications, and how Accusoft and other established companies have maximized its potential.

Benefit No. 1: Lower operating costs

Hard to get past this one, right? Any new initiative that helps rein in everyday expenses will likely motivate executives to try it, and cloud usage has indeed proven itself to be a cost-effective method for handling a company's data needs.

The most obvious area of savings is in hardware. Businesses can save tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars annually by using the servers of a cloud provider rather than investing in their own equipment. This outsourcing also removes the need for on-site administrators, reducing payroll overhead and freeing up physical workspace. And it's eco-friendly, reducing energy consumption and helping to lessen the company's carbon footprint.

Prominent organizations are realizing all of these cost benefits. The Yamaha Corporation of America, Yamaha's division specializing in manufacturing musical instruments and audio/visual tools, decided to migrate most of its data operations to Amazon Web Services (AWS), an established provider that services Accusoft as well, in 2014. The company was pleased with the process and even happier about the end result: a projected savings of $500,000 per year due to its move to the cloud.

Here is where our customers really take notice when we suggest using PrizmDoc Cloud. We estimate that a Windows client executing between 120,000 and 240,000 monthly transactions while running PrizmDoc on its own servers will spend more than more $16,000 per month when capital expenditures (hardware) and operating expenditures (payroll, maintenance, etc.) are considered. The cloud version, conversely, costs less than $2,000 monthly with the same usage load, because of the advantages we mentioned.

Benefit No. 2: Enhanced data security

Though recent scares have made some wonder about the safety of corporate data which is handled externally, statistics show that cloud networks themselves have been consistently secure. In fact, many businesses have begun to see security as a major motivation for moving to the cloud in the first place, reasoning that safeguarding their sensitive data is better left to professionals.

An emerging approach is to combine the security features of a cloud services provider (such as highly-refined encrypting techniques) with a company's own security protocols to ensure the integrity of its data. One expert provides some pointers for implementing such a strategy in this helpful overview, which explains the basics of both encryption and cloud security.

Time Inc. is a firm believer in cloud security and AWS, closing down its own data centers and completely entrusting AWS with its massive database of customer information in 2015. The move was an enormous leap of faith for the media giant – which maintains personal data including 45 million credit cards used to purchase its print and digital products – but one made after extensive research about cloud services and their various providers. Just like Accusoft, Time made the decision to team up with Amazon and has seen that relationship prosper.

Accusoft's commitment to data integrity led to PrizmDoc Cloud earning a SOC 2 Type 1 certification for cloud computing services in June 2018. The designation, awarded by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), was the result of PrizmDoc Cloud meeting key performance criteria in areas such as security, privacy and confidentiality. We're proud of this certification and consider it proof that our partnership with Amazon Web Services is benefitting everyone involved, most importantly customers of PrizmDoc Cloud.

Benefit No. 3: Ease of setup

And because cloud usage has become commonplace in recent years, competition has spurred these providers to expedite setting up client companies, such as Accusoft, on their networks. The competitors in this space range from the world famous (such as the industry's 'big three' of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) to smaller firms such as several profiled here several profiled here that can offer customized solutions based on a firm's particular needs.

General Electric has also made the most of Amazon's responsiveness, using AWS to host more than 2,000 applications by the end of 2017. The seamless transition has enabled the company to focus on its own evolution rather than the burden of operating infrastructure to support its products.

"Adopting a cloud-first strategy with AWS is helping our IT teams get out of the business of building and running data centers and refocus our resources on innovation," said Chris Drumgoole, GE's CTO and corporate vice president.

Accusoft's alliance with AWS means that our customers don't have to worry about the specifics of getting PrizmDoc Cloud deployed; they know that we and AWS have already done the work for them. And our PrizmDoc Cloud customer portal tells them all they need to know about their account once they're up and running, such as usage rates and educational material on our various subscription options.

Benefit No. 4: Flexible pricing programs

One great benefit of cloud access is that the connection is virtually always on, and can be used as much or as little as your usage dictates. Thus, companies who host applications in the cloud typically offer subscription options tailored to their customers' specific needs.

For instance, a governmental entity that processes millions of transactions is better off with a time-based subscription (monthly, yearly, etc.) featuring unlimited usage, whereas a smaller company would likely prefer to pay only for transactions as it needs them. In each case, the customer should have the autonomy to choose the best solution for its own usage.

The wealth of options can be confusing, of course, but generally the most important consideration is understanding your own needs. Channel Futures, a digital services industry authority, published this checklist for companies to review as they consider their cloud subscription options.

We created various PrizmDoc Cloud subscription types with this in mind. No two customers are the same, and thus no two will use the product in exactly the same fashion. So we offer pricing programs based on either time period or transaction volume, depending on which is more relevant for a particular user.

No matter where your organization falls in this spectrum, we have a plan that can suit your specific needs. Use this overview of our pricing programs, complete with a sliding scale to accommodate your anticipated transaction usage, to find the plan that's best for you (and look over the FAQ section at the bottom). Bear in mind that you can change plans as your needs evolve.

Benefit No. 5: Professional technical support

We mentioned how competition among the top SaaS providers (AWS, Microsoft, Google, etc.) has helped refine the cloud industry in terms of improved data security and quicker startup times for clients. Another example of this competitive effect is in customer support, a crucial area where providers are seeking separation from one another. AWS, for instance, has developed a multi-tiered approach to support, wherein customers can select a plan based on budget and level of usage.

And just as in the case of data security, synergy is often the key in providing complete technical support for cloud users. Companies who host applications in the cloud typically offer their own support team, and lean on their providers' technical specialists whenever server problems arise.

Thanks to this leveraging of support expertise, developers know they'll get the assistance they need to keep their apps working smoothly, with the process staying virtually invisible to their end users.

We pride ourselves on providing the best possible customer support experience whenever help is needed. Our technical support professionals have a comprehensive knowledge of PrizmDoc Cloud, routinely answering questions and offering tips to make sure our customers (and their applications) get the most out of the product.

This commitment is evidenced by the Accusoft support group's high Net Promoter score, a tech industry standard for measuring customer satisfaction. Our team earned a cumulative score of 44 (versus an industry average of 32) in early 2018, up from 43 the previous quarter, and we've consistently been above industry averages since 2016. We're always educating our support staff on PrizmDoc and our other development tools, proving that an investment in any of our products is just the beginning of your relationship with Accusoft

PrizmDoc Cloud: A viewing toolkit for the future

The benefits detailed above are all a part of PrizmDoc Cloud, the SaaS-based version of our document and image viewing API toolkit, and help it create a dynamic, intuitive user experience in applications.

You may already know at least a bit about PrizmDoc itself. Its versatility and ease of integration into apps make it a leader among document viewing options for developers. We've always given our customers the option to self-host PrizmDoc on their own servers, but we're excited to help them learn about the possibilities of deploying PrizmDoc Cloud, which combines this powerful toolkit with all the advantages of using the cloud.

We recommend PrizmDoc Cloud over self-hosting because no matter what your company does, or what functionality your applications provide to end users, using the cloud can save you time, money and headaches for years to come. Its surge in popularity among organizations of all types proves the cloud has already become an indispensable part of any long-term IT strategy.

Be cloud – and proud

PrizmDoc Cloud combines the power of a complete suite of API-based web services with the many benefits of working in the cloud that we expanded upon here. Contact us with your questions or comments about this unique toolkit, or learn more about the versatility of the PrizmDoc product itself by trying out our demos here.

Accusoft's ImageGear for .NET has established a reputation over the years as one of the most comprehensive imaging tools available to developers. It gives applications across many industries valuable functionality, enabling engineers, physicians and various other professionals to handle image viewing and processing (tasks like file capture, file conversion and optical character recognition) with ease.

But it also has features that its name – ImageGear – might lead some to overlook. Prominent among these is the power and versatility of an embedded HTML5 viewer, which helps ensure that ImageGear for .NET can do as much for text-based content as it does for images.

The viewer integration offers several advantages for application development, such as unmatched flexibility. The viewer itself has zero footprint and operates on any platform, language or device. So whether your end users are running Linux or Windows, on desktops or mobile devices, the viewer can handle your needs. It also supports over 100 file formats, ranging from the very common (PDFs and Microsoft Word documents) to industry-specific types (like the DICOM image files prevalent in radiology).

And the most recent release of ImageGear for .NET takes things a step for further, incorporating annotation into the HTML5 viewer. This allows multiple end users to collaborate on their work, highlighting or commenting on specific passages or emphasizing important areas of images. These markups are saved as separate layers, meaning they can easily be updated or deleted over the course of collaborating on the files.

Accusoft customers have noted the usefulness of similar annotations in PrizmDoc, our suite of REST APIs that also features an HTML5 document viewer, and we saw value in integrating that functionality into ImageGear for .NET. Now your applications can count on one SDK to facilitate collaboration on virtually any type of work file, whether a simple text document, spreadsheet, architectural rendering or highly intricate medical image.

In the example above, multiple users are collaborating on an image of an X-ray, using ImageGear for .NET's HTML5 viewer to zoom, as well as its annotation functionality to offer feedback and recommended courses of treatment. And as mentioned, since all markup is handled in separate layers from the image itself, the original file is not altered.

It's easy to get caught up in the many other document and imaging functions that ImageGear provides, but annotation is another valuable feature that can make a real difference for applications of various kinds. Try our online demo here or contact us to learn more about our products and how they can help you.

If you're a developer working with traditional lenders, you know how difficult it can be for them to gather all of the  necessary documents from a prospective borrower. Whether it's W-2s, employment verifications, credit histories or other supporting information, the data comes in various different digital formats. Trying to capture all of this data from digital file types like PDF, Word, .txt, .xsl, .jpg, etc., is a daunting task.

Plus, with reduced timeframes to process the data, the job quickly becomes overwhelming. Sorting through dozens of file formats and manually gathering the data is causing delays in loan approvals that are costly to your customers. Your current application offers a variety of benefits for lenders, but aren't there tools that could allow them to be more efficient in the document capture process?

The Problem With Multiple File Formats

Some lenders can't seem to figure out why everyone keeps saying that digital banking is the future. It's been nothing but a headache for them – especially when they consider the pressure to reduce turnaround times for credit or loan approval. With a variety of different file formats sent to them digitally, information often gets lost in translation.

The time it takes to convert files to a standard format is one issue, but that's not even the biggest worry. Many documents come in with misaligned data, ink blotches covering essential info, blurry text, and other imperfections. How are your clients supposed to keep up with their competitors when they're facing so many delays in the approval process?

Speed is essential when competing for the borrower's business. Institutions like LendingClub have figured that out, providing credit approval in as little as a week, even for large sums. That turnaround seems unrealistic considering the amount of work it takes to evaluate a person's credit and financial stability, but it's the sort of benchmark facing banks every day.

The Solution Is in Your Product

What if we told you that your applications can play a huge role in solving the problem? Some banks and other traditional lenders – just like your clients – are becoming more and more efficient at compiling and analyzing a prospective borrower's credentials and providing approval in a competitive timeframe.

How are they doing it? They're eliminating roadblocks, starting with removing blemishes on documents and speeding up the aggregation process. Stop wasting time developing data correction solutions that are already built. Why work harder and waste time when you can easily integrate a ready-made SDK into your own applications to make the fixes?

Help your banking clients process and evaluate borrowers' financial stability faster. Integrate our ScanFix Xpress SDK into your software and help your clients discover the data they need quickly, including confidence values that let them know where data integrity problems are most likely to live.

Don't waste time or money developing redundant code. We have a team of developers that specializes in SDKs addressing the needs of the financial community. When you integrate ScanFix Xpress into your software, you gain another selling advantage for your product, as well as more clients appreciative of the difference you're making for them.

Help your customers stay ahead of the competition with this functionality. Give your work confidence values that will make you smile. Learn more about ScanFix Xpress here. If you have questions for Accusoft, contact us here.

As a developer working with lenders, you strive to build an application that makes life easier for your clients. In the financial industry, processing data is essential. In order to process it efficiently, lenders must collect data from a variety of different forms. Whether consumers are coming to them for a loan, bank account or credit card, lenders must collect a variety of personal information from them in order to approve or decline their request.

In an ever-changing digital landscape, financial institutions big and small are struggling to keep up with the instantaneous product offerings which consumers are coming to expect. This mindset is pushing lenders to reconsider their data gathering processes, searching for faster, more efficient solutions.

Manual Form Entry Is Outdated

There are so many forms consumers must fill out to get approved for financial requests. Loans, in particular, can be daunting. Underwriters need everything from pay stubs and bank statements to work history and credit score reports. When you think about it, that's a lot of data (in a variety of different formats) for lenders to sort through.

In today's world, manually entering data from paper forms is outdated – and, quite frankly, tedious. Why work harder, when there's the ability to work smarter? The only problem for lenders is that this technology is often expensive. They all need a solution that they can afford with more efficient capabilities. That's where your application can help.

Lenders can use digital technology to identify form types, convert them into the same file format, scan documents using optical character recognition (OCR), and extract information from forms, all thanks to software that adapts automatically to the format of the form being read.

Creating a Solution within Your Application

Your application offers a variety of robust services for financial professionals, but is it lacking a forms processing component? Don't waste precious development time coding the functionality when a comprehensive solution is already available, and at an affordable price.

At Accusoft, we have a team of experienced developers who specialize in SDKs serving the financial industry. FormSuite for Structured Forms uses industry-leading OCR, ICR, and OMR to identify form types, cleanup document blemishes and extract data.

This SDK enables your application to extract phone numbers, signatures, filled-in bubble answers, checkmarked boxes, hand-printed text fields, barcodes and more. FormSuite identifies the correct form and aligns it even if it is rotated, skewed or scaled. Plus, you can build in the functionality to route data from the form into any database, making the application process so much easier for your clients to navigate.

When you integrate FormSuite for Structured Forms into your application, you gain much more functionality for your product and your customers gain another benefit from your services. They'll be saving time using your application – just like you'll save time writing code.

When your clients have the ability to process data faster, they win more business. Help your customers succeed, and remain their trusted partner for digital financial technology. For more information on FormSuite for Structured Forms, visit our overview page. If you have any questions for the Accusoft team, feel free to contact us.

Your product helps financial institutions with a variety of different processes, but one challenge still remains. Lending institutions are struggling to keep up with the times in a world where customers expect instant gratification. When consumers request anything from a bank or lending organization, they expect the application process to be quick and easy.

Lenders are searching for ways to approve applicants in a more timely manner. However, each new request comes with a variety of different forms to sort through. With so much data to organize and analyze, this process is a struggle for financial institutions. They need to approve the request before the consumer starts looking at their competitors. How can your product help your clients stay up to date?

Building New Solutions

Financial institutions need a product that includes data capture and processing tools, enabling them to approve loan applications more efficiently. Your product could help them begin this process. Data capture and form processing facilitate the automation of lending, whether it's a line of credit or loan origination.

Once various borrower documents are gathered, they can be scanned and cleaned in preparation for processing.  Then you can start extracting data. To do this, you'll need a way to identify the form fields and recognize the data within them.

Identifying Form Fields

Lenders generally have a standard procedure in place for viewing and collaborating on borrower histories. Historically, when they view the files, such as W-2s and other IRS forms, they need to be able to find and highlight specific information from those forms that the lender needs in order to process the loan.

What if you could give them a way to complete this task quickly and efficiently without the hassle of coding it yourself? When you integrate Accusoft's FormSuite for Structured Forms software development kit (SDK) into your application, you're providing a quicker way for lenders to obtain data. FormSuite automatically identifies the type of form based on examples in its master library. You can even customize FormSuite's master library to include your most common or most complex form so data is easily categorized from the beginning. Plus, FormSuite simplifies the process of sifting through forms with functions like search, annotation, file conversion, and more.

How does it work? This SDK uses specific character recognition algorithms like optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) that enable FormSuite to capture the data from a scanned paper document.

The OCR in FormSuite enables your application to avoid recognition errors by identifying expected character patterns within fields, and enables designation of specific field types to match patterns like email, date, phone, and more.

In addition, FormSuite enables you to set up a validation system to test for accuracy of OCR results. When you check a confidence value returned from FormSuite and the number falls below your specified threshold, you know you need an operator to review. FormSuite will intelligently suggest characters for replacement so this process is accelerated for your operator.

ICR provides the precision and accuracy you need to extract hand-printed characters and data that you can map to database fields. The robust recognition features include character sets such as upper case, lower case, mixed case alphabetic, digits, currency, and punctuation. ICR in FormSuite can also identify a telephone number, date, email address, Social Security number, currency, URL, and more.

No matter the size of the file, our SDK quickly categorizes forms, identifies form fields, and enables your users to search for unique information that instantly locates the form on the individual they seek to review.

Coding the Data Transfer

Plus, when you integrate an SDK that codes in a way to transfer data to a specific database, you eliminate the struggle entirely. Save your precious time and money coding out a solution for form identification and form field detection and let us do the heavy lifting for you. Focus on providing the best product to your clients and less on creating the code to do it.

When your clients have the ability to process data faster, they win more business. Help your customers succeed, and remain their trusted partner for digital financial technology. Learn more about how Accusoft's FormSuite for Structured Forms SDK can enhance your application's credibility and solution offerings on our overview page. If you have any questions for the Accusoft team, feel free to contact us.

Whether your clients are working on processing a loan or gathering financial data for a consumer's credit request, lending is a complex process that is only getting more complicated in this fast-paced digital era. Your application helps financial institutions address a variety of pain points, but is it solving the one that's most pressing today?

Finding consumer data should be easy. However, lenders deal with multiple forms, files and documents, all containing various data points in different formats. Needless to say, juggling Excel, PDF, Word, JPEG and other file types all at once can get complicated quickly – especially when you consider there are thousands of people applying for loans daily.

As we discussed in our recent blog post, Build Data Extraction Into Your Financial Application, a major advantage of using algorithms like optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) is that they provide searchable borrower data. In addition, these algorithms reduce the processing time delivering data to your lending teams faster.

Banks can use these algorithms to search prospective borrower histories in seconds for unique identifiers like name, Social Security number, or employer ID. While OCR and ICR are both crucial for searching borrower data in an application, they wouldn't help much if the lender didn't have a way to view a variety of different formats in a singular viewer.

Document Viewing as a Service

Financial institutions are searching for a standard procedure to help them facilitate viewing of and collaborating on borrower histories. Due to time restrictions, they need a procedure that simplifies functions like search, annotation, file conversion, and more.

What if there was a way to view a variety of different document types within your own application? Imagine a lender uploading the forms into your product, viewing customer data all in one place, sending information through various approval routes, and searching for the information they need in seconds. Our previous blogs Adding Document Capture Into Your Financial Application and Adding Form Processing Into Your Application explain these pain points in further detail. Building out the entire process could take a long while to code, which can easily be avoided by integrating Accusoft products into your solution.

With Accusoft's unique software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs), you can integrate a variety of different features into your product to help lenders process credit applications faster. They can view consumer data within files, identify data in form fields, and extract borrower information into a database.

A Pre-Built Solution to Enhance Your Product

Accusoft has a solution that can greatly reduce your coding time. PrizmDoc is a highly versatile document viewer that handles a variety of issues typically encountered in loan origination. Easily embeddable into applications, the PrizmDoc HTML5 viewer enables you to worry less about code and focus more on your clients' pain points.

When you integrate PrizmDoc into your application, your lenders can view dozens of file formats, including the text files most commonly associated with loan processing, without leaving the native program. For example, if a lender needs to view an Excel file, they can view it within your application without opening Excel itself and exiting your application.

In addition, PrizmDoc has search functionality that enables you to find information quickly and efficiently. When you search a document for specific information, PrizmDoc uses hit highlighting to locate the information in seconds – even if the document is thousands of pages long.

With these unique features already in PrizmDoc, it's easy to see why Accusoft products are trusted by major brands. Make sure your clients are getting the versatility they need by delivering a customized solution for them. When you integrate the PrizmDoc HTML5 viewer into your application, you're saving coding time and creating a more powerful solution for your customers.

Stay tuned to learn more about the loan origination process and what pain points your application can solve in our next blog. For more information on PrizmDoc, visit our overview page. If you have any questions for the Accusoft team, feel free to contact us.

 
There are a variety of factors that go into consumer approval for loans. Before a financial institution agrees to lend a person thousands of dollars, they want to make sure they'll be able to pay it back. To do this, lenders must collaborate with different parties to get approval for the loan.

The whole process is data intensive and the costs are high. Loan origination costs around $8,000 on average, but that doesn't include regulatory fines if the loan doesn't meet industry requirements. Fines can be millions of dollars if regulators catch missing data or required information in the final document. That's a costly mistake for your clients.

Luckily, your software can help them avoid these financially crippling mistakes. As we've previously discussed in our blogs Adding Document Capture Into Your Financial Application and Adding Form Processing Into Your Application, you can easily integrate ways for your clients to load a variety of file types into one platform, search the documents for data, extract information, and transfer those consumer files through different departments. Let's take a look at how this could be particularly useful in loan origination.
 

Steps in a Loan Approval

There are so many people involved in the loan origination process before it even gets to approval. When a consumer begins the process, their realtor usually puts them in touch with a mortgage advisor who works with loan officers to collect the information lenders need to approve applications.

The loan officer is the person responsible for ensuring that the consumer is qualified for a loan. Once a credit score is provided and approved, the loan type is selected and the interest rate is locked in. Next, the loan goes to processing. In this department, creditworthiness is approved or denied based on a variety of financial factors including credit reports, job stability, consumer credit history, etc. During this stage, consumers are asked to provide a variety of files to document their creditworthiness. The files will include important information that contributes to the approval or denial of the loan.

By the time the loan goes to underwriting, the consumer has already provided lenders and the loan processing agents a wide breadth of information in a variety of file formats. This is where a feature like FormSuite could enhance your product and help your customers. Using optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR), FormSuite helps your clients scan a variety of different file formats for unique information. Learn more about this process in our Build Data Extraction Into Your Financial Application blog.

From bank account statements and credit reports to job history and residence history, lenders are collecting information from the consumer in a variety of different ways at different points in the process. That's a lot of different information to organize for just one loan. It can get complicated quickly.

Underwriters must review all the documentation to see if the loan can be approved. They determine if funding needs can be met and run a second credit report to ensure the consumer hasn't made any other large purchases during the origination process. Then the underwriter passes the loan to the closing department.

The loan package is then reviewed. They confirm the fees and send the final documentation to the settlement agent for preparation and execution of closing documents. Finally, the lender's quality control department will review the loan for errors and send it to a central clearing house before being transferred to the consumer.

Why so many steps? Well, if there is a mistake, it can cost lenders a lot of money. The failure to compile consumer data and submit to regulators on time can result in massive fines. These penalties are put in place by regulators to keep lenders from making mistakes that could cost the consumer.

Due to loan origination costs, lenders can't afford to be in violation of loan regulations. Detecting regulatory exceptions prior to origination can save a lender time and money. With an HTML5 document viewer like Accusoft's PrizmDoc, your clients can view specific pages of each document and collaborate between departments with tools like annotation and redaction. Simply build out a way for lenders to route specific pages of the document to different departments and then they can view and collaborate on the document through PrizmDoc. This will enable a full-circle approval process for lenders to easily review applicant information between departments.
 

Integrating a Versatile Document Viewer Into Your Application

PrizmDoc facilitates collaboration on loan origination documents, allowing lending officials to highlight specific areas of a document or make comments through annotation without updating any original versions of files. This helps identify any red flags or unique circumstances which could affect an applicant's loan status.

As the consumer's files go through the loan origination process, they will be viewed by a variety of different departments. Using PrizmDoc's annotation tools, comments and red flags can be addressed quickly by each department, enabling them to avoid any potential errors.

In addition, PrizmDoc has features that can help with security audits as well. The HTML5 viewer enhances an organization's information security by enabling authorized users to grant or revoke access to confidential files. For example, printing or downloading files can be disabled based on an individual's security authorization. This ensures that confidential data stays internal to the company, complying with strategic guidelines and legal requirements. This can be especially useful if lending institutions are working with outside loan officers. If there is confidential information that they are not authorized to see, PrizmDoc can restrict the information based on authorized use.

One of the most desirable functionalities of PrizmDoc is its ability to handle file conversions. Do your clients need to convert multiple file formats into a single multi-page document? It's no surprise that consolidating each customer's data is very helpful when reviewing loan application information. PrizmDoc can help. Plus, this unique program is available on a variety of different devices. Help your lenders move through the loan origination process with ease and peace of mind, knowing their consumers' loan documents can be viewed safely and securely on mobile devices.
 

How SDKs and APIs Can Help Your Application Grow With Your Customers

In summary, Accusoft has a variety of SDKs and APIs that can help your application flourish. Don't waste time coding solutions that are already available at an affordable price. In fact, you'll enhance your product and help your customers alleviate pain points at the same time.

With ScanFix Xpress, your program can allow lenders to scan in a variety of different files and documents. FormSuite enables you to use OCR and ICR to identify form fields, capture data, and extract information. In addition, PrizmDoc grants your lenders the ability to view all consumer documents in one place without having to open other programs like Microsoft Excel. Help your clients make loan origination and credit approvals easier with Accusoft's SDKs and APIs.

Are you ready to enhance your current application? We would love to hear from you, contact us.

By: Greg Namyak, Director of Customer Relationship Management
 

 
Joining Accusoft a few short months ago, I immediately recognized that there is a strong passion for innovation in the company. What I also noticed was that Accusoft always puts their customers first.

When I came on board as the Director of Customer Relationship Management, our mission was to redesign the way we connected with our clients. It's vital to get customer insight and build relationships, and Accusoft was already doing a lot of those things.

However, they needed more dedicated support. We created the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) department in June of 2018 to continue building and maintaining the bond between our company and our customers. We want to know what our customers think about the products we currently have and how we can improve those offerings.

No one can deny that the technical landscape can be complicated. We understand that SDKs and APIs are not products that the average Joe can talk about knowledgeably. So it's completely understandable when our clients have questions on new feature updates, the integration process, and how they can use our products to enhance their applications.

By adding the CRM team to the mix, we're providing a direct line for customers who have questions, concerns, or input. We hope to not only provide first class support, but also engage our customers in conversations about what solutions are available for their needs.

We're confident that we now have the perfect combination of products and support to help our customers excel. Plus, we can now understand what we do well and what we need to do to expand our offerings.

Now Accusoft's customers have a dedicated resource for services including contact renewals, billing, support, and questions. If you need help finding solutions to boost your applications and streamline your development cycles, we've got a Customer Relationship Representative (CRR) that knows exactly how to address your needs.

Our CRM team is comprised of dedicated CRRs who are in charge of specific customer accounts. Created in alignment with the sales team, your dedicated CRR is the core resource for understanding product changes, updates, and information.

Whether there is a changing need in the way you use our products or a simple question you need addressed, your dedicated CRR will have all the answers. Now that our CRM Department is now fully up and running, we look forward to being the champion for our customers.

We welcome the opportunity to partner with our existing customer base and to create new partnerships as we move ahead with this exciting new venture. During the next few months, our CRRs will continue to reach out to current customers. So if you're already an Accusoft veteran, expect a call soon. If you're new, we can't wait to help you address your company's needs.

I'm very excited to be a part of a team that is dedicated to innovation. We can't wait to help you get the most out of your Accusoft products.

 
Law firms and legal departments of businesses and government organizations spend a great deal of their time immersed in one or more stages of the document lifecycle. Most law firms use a combination of a document management repositories, matter management services, and cloud-based or local file-shares. However, client files can be challenging to find without enterprise search and governance.

What helps eliminate that search dilemma? It starts with implementing a document lifecycle that works for your company, which includes the following stages:

• Capture and Organize
• Review and Collaborate
• Workflow and Approval
• Publish and Share

However, document workflows can increase security concerns. If files go outside the firewall or aren’t safeguarded by encryption, redaction, and digital rights management (DRM), sensitive client and internal data can get into the wrong hands. Let’s look at these four document lifecycle stages as they relate to the legal industry, and explore how document security is crucial, yet attainable.
 

Document Capture and Organization

 
As case files grow, more documents are added to the workload. Once a document is created, it must be converted into a searchable digital format like a PDF. Often times, it's easier to create a searchable PDF with all the information from the case in one collective document.

However, merging different file types together can be a hassle. With a solution for multi-file conversion, you can easily profile each case with metadata such as author, case number, and etc. to enhance the file’s discoverability. Using a conversion such as this enables a paralegal or attorney to:

• Watermark the file to impede unauthorized document copying
• Redact a document for sensitive phrases, sentences, or words using powerful search and hit highlighting
• Apply encryption and distribute keys or passwords for privileged users
• Use digital rights management controls to restrict who can print, download, copy, or share a document

Once the document is filed in the designated repository or file-share, that content will either follow the workflow rules of an ECM folder or remain in the folder until it is needed again. Whether the document is viewed right away or moves to a designated reviewer, it is critical that it is secured and accessible only by a privileged few based on business need.
 

Review and Collaborate

 
Many law firms and legal professionals within government organizations have restrictions on the file viewing applications they install on computers and mobile devices. This protects corporate devices, facilitates file access, and enhances security. With the right toolkit in your application, you can redact any further sensitive content within the document which should be restricted to protect the client, firm, or organization which wasn’t completed in the first stage.

In some cases, you can even highlight, annotate, and comment on the document as it is going through revisions. Plus, you can merge multiple file types into a single file for eDiscovery or litigation readiness. Instead of multiple file types in a folder, all requiring their own viewing and editing application like Word, e-mails, or PDF attachments, a simple integration into your legal application can provide access to an entire case file.

This makes your document management process a breeze for everyone involved. Minimize search time for case files, ensure consistent permissions and controls on original documents, and reduce the number of file attachments sent internally and externally, regardless of size.
 

Workflow and Approval

 
Documents like contracts often go through multiple internal and external reviews before being approved by eSignatures. They may pass back and forth through a virtual deal room between joint venture partners or lead up to a merger or acquisition. The documents involved in these circumstances are very sensitive and could be disastrous if they are viewed by the wrong external or internal user.

Until all the details are finalized, functions like encryption, DRM, and redaction can be the last line of defense between a company or individual’s successful future or their destruction. All along the workflow path, redactions, comments, and signatures can be maintained. Workflows can follow pre-configured triggers just as easily as manually sharing files.
 

Publish and Share

 
Once a document is finalized or a court case is completed, law firms or legal departments often need to make them accessible to the public. Other times, it may be a private entity who needs access through a CRM application, website CMS, or ECM archive. These files often need to be accessible through laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Merging multiple documents into a single PDF or URL are common sharing methods for legal technology platforms.

For legal tech application development professionals, building custom document management functionality into their own applications may be too resource intensive, or isn’t as urgent a priority as it should be. Legal professionals that need this capability should encourage their legal tech vendors to explore the opportunity of embedding secure, standards-based APIs and proven SDKs into their platforms.

Are you a partner in a law firm, corporate counsel, or legal technology executive looking to embed document security and lifecycle management capabilities into your application stack?

Visit us at LegalTech 2019 in New York, January 28-31. We'll be at booth #234 on Level II. See you there.