ImageGear® .NET is the most advanced way to create, control, and deliver more secure, high-quality imaging applications. ImageGear allows you to add powerful imaging capabilities to your applications. ImageGear supports the most commonly used graphics file formats, providing complete compatibility when developing applications across multiple platforms, or when developing for users who have a variety of target systems.

Samples

ImageGear provides a variety of easy-to-use sample programs and images to help get you up and running quickly. You can copy and modify them as needed and use them as templates for developing your own applications. The sample images may also be used for any purpose, such as testing your applications as you develop them.

See Samples for a complete list of the samples available, along with their descriptions and where you can find them.

Formats and Compressions

ImageGear supports the most commonly used graphics file formats with different compressions as well as most of the industry-standard compression algorithms (see File Formats and Compressions for details).

PDF

ImageGear provides a comprehensive API (and suite of Samples), enabling you to read, write, display, edit, and annotate Portable Document Format (PDF), PostScript (PS), and Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) formats.  ImageGear also allows access to PDF AcroForms, to read, write, and create interactive form fields inside a PDF. ImageGear supports digital signatures for PDF documents, allowing you to digitally sign PDF documents with approval signatures and verify signed PDF documents with certification and approval signatures.

ImageGear provides low-level access to the PDF libraries, allowing you to easily integrate PDF into your imaging applications. See the PDF section for a tutorial that will help you get started using ImageGear PDF as well as How to... topics that will help you perform common PDF operations.

DICOM

The ImageGear Medical (MD) component supports the DICOM format, contains a custom API, and includes expanded image processing capabilities beyond those of the baseline ImageGear library.

The format support of the MD component includes loading and saving monochrome, palletized, and true color medical images using the following file formats:

• DICOM 3.0 Part 10-compliant images
• DICOM 3.0 Raw Format (non-Part 10-compliant)

In addition, your application will continue to support all ImageGear-supported file formats, allowing you to convert an image of a different format to a medical image format, and vice-versa. See DICOM for details about using this functionality.

Digital Camera RAW

ImageGear supports reading raw images created by many (several hundred) digital cameras. Support for raw images includes reading of image pixel data, color reconstruction of raw images, and reading of metadata stored with the images. See Digital Camera RAW for more information.

JPEG 2000

With ImageGear, you can create an imaging application that supports the JPEG 2000 standard (Part I) and JPEG 2000 extensions (Part II) formats.

The JPEG 2000 standard addresses areas where other standards fail to produce the best quality or performance and provides capabilities to markets that currently do not use compression. The markets and applications better served by the JPEG 2000 standard are Internet, color facsimile, printing, scanning (consumer and pre-press), digital photography, remote sensing, mobile, medical imagery, digital libraries / archives and E-commerce.

The standard allows creating raw JPEG 2000 codestream files, which only contain compressed data and the minimal necessary headers, as well as JP2-compatible files, which contain additional information about image color space, resolution, and some text metadata fields.

The JPEG 2000 Standard Part II defines an extended format called JPX, which defines numerous extensions, including support for different color spaces (like CMYK), advanced support for transparent channels, and additional metadata elements.

Refer to the JPEG 2000 section for more information.

Microsoft Office

Load and display Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with the ImageGear.Formats.Office namespace enabled. 

The Open XML formats (docx, xlsx, and pptx) improve file and data management, data recovery, and interoperability with line-of-business systems. They extend what is possible with the binary files of earlier versions. Any application that supports XML can access and work with data in the new file format. The application does not need to be part of the Microsoft Office system or even a Microsoft product. You can also use standard transformations to extract or repurpose the data. In addition, security concerns are drastically reduced because the information is stored in XML, which is essentially plain text. Thus, the data can pass through corporate firewalls without hindrance.

ImageGear .NET also supports the same features for binary Microsoft Office files (doc, xls, and ppt). For the list of supported Office formats, see File Formats and Compressions.

The ImageGear.Formats.Office namespace will allow you to view Office documents, convert them to PDF, and extract text from Word and PowerPoint documents. ImageGear uses LibreOffice in the background to achieve the above mentioned functionality. Using LibreOffice in the background ensures that all supported Office documents are rendered with high fidelity. To interface with LibreOffice, we have created the LibreOffice Instance Manager (LIM), which is a small service that runs in the background and handles how ImageGear interacts with LibreOffice.

See the Office section for more information.

CAD

ImageGear offers support for reading, viewing, and exporting several CAD formats, such as DWG, DXF, and DGN. Common operations supported by the CAD API include:

• Loading and reading a variety of specifications, including AutoCAD 2018.
• Export conversion to other formats, including rasterization (PNG, BMP, JPG, etc.) and vectorization (PDF, SVG). This includes exporting to 3D-enabled (PRC) PDF files.
• Displaying the CAD drawing in a 3D view with an easy-to-use camera.
• Manipulating active layouts, layers, and views.
• Extracting text from the active layout.
• Adding and manipulating light sources.

See the CAD section for more information.

Additional Format Support

In addition, ImageGear provides support for the following:

• File conversion from one format to another (see Compressing and Converting Images).
• Metadata support.
• Native CMYK support means that CMYK images can be loaded into ImageGear without being converted to RGB to ensure the original color information is maintained. The majority of image processing, image access, display, and other functions work with native CMYK image data. Images can then be saved to formats that support CMYK color space. See the Color section for more information.

Viewing

ImageGear gives you complete control over how your application displays images and documents. Among the viewing attributes you can set on an image-by-image basis are:

• Contrast/Brightness
• Transparency
• Dithering
• Anti-aliasing
• Auto-color reduction for low color
  modes
• Color reduction (several types)
• Gamma correction
• Preserve black and preserve white display for 1-bit images
• 4x faster scale-to-gray
• Use an image's LUTs (Look-Up Tables) to translate the palette to another set of colors
• Background fill pattern and color to
  use
• Large image display capability
• High-quality display for all video modes
• Merge 2 images during display
• Display effects (wipes, blocks, etc.)
• Rotation
• Center, zoom, or scroll a displayed image from within your application
• Center image, fit to width, height, window
• Sub-region display
• Auto-aspect ratio
• Portion of the image to display (Image Rectangle)
• Region within the display area to display the image (Device Rectangle)
• Fitting the Image Rectangle to the Device Rectangle

Document Cleanup and Image Processing

ImageGear provides the following image processing and cleanup capabilities:

• Region of interest (ROI) support
  • Specify rectangular ROI for nearly all image processing functions.
  • Specify arbitrary ROI for most image processing functions. Functions included to create certain shape types such as ellipse, polygon, and freehand.
  • Create a 1-bit mask image for identifying which pixels to include/exclude from image processing algorithms.
• Complete color space support, including color space conversions, color separation and combination, support for any color space found in any supported formats, and support for color spaces such as CMYK without conversion to RGB.
• Color reduction that maximizes quality and minimizes size.
• Encryption and decryption of an entire image or any part of an image.
• Matrix convolutions of any size with pre-defined or user-supplied matrix values.
• Special effects.
• Automatic ImageClean image correction of white text blocks, unnecessary borders, and inverted or rotated images.
• Intelligent re-sizing.
• Access to the values of individual pixels, rows or columns of pixels, and rectangular groups of pixels

OCR

ImageGear provides OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for almost any document, including those produced on typewriters, dot-matrix printers, ink-jet printers, laser printers, and phototypesetters, as well as photocopied and faxed versions of any document.

With ImageGear's OCR capability, you can recognize a document image and export the text in one of the supported output formats, including 8-bit ASII and 16-bit Unicode text, Microsoft Word, HTML, and others.

The ImageGear Recognition Component also allows a user to:

• Manage delineated zones of a document page and then specify treatment for those zones. This includes the ability to correct the OCR engine's automatic segmentation between the segmentation phase and the recognition phase.
• Process both text and graphics. The recognition software's ability to distinguish graphics from text can provide the basis of a compound document processing system.
• Automatically detect fax, dot matrix, and other degraded documents and compensate accordingly.
• Recognize Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Japanese, and Korean languages.

Scanning

ImageGear provides scanning support for TWAIN and for web-based scanning:

• TWAIN scanning: ImageGear supports TWAIN 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9, and works with a variety of scanner devices, digital cameras, and video capture boards. The ImageGear TWAIN functionality allows you to control the following:
  • TWAIN transfer mode
  • Available TWAIN device listing
  • Scanning area
  • Brightness and contrast
  • DPI (dots-per-inch) resolution
  • Display of the TWAIN UI
  • Setting of a callback function to gain control during scanning
  • ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) for multi-page scanning
  • Scanner capabilities
• Web-Based Scanning: ImageGear provides functionality for obtaining an image or document from an ISIS or TWAIN compliant device in a web-based application running in a browser.

Annotations

Add redlining and annotation capabilities to any application built with ImageGear. If you have an application that can read, display, and print images, you can add marking capabilities, such as lines, arrows, highlighting, and sticky notes to documents images, and use them as though you were working on printed sheets of paper.

ImageGear ART works as an overlay to loaded images. ART annotation marks can include vector graphics, text, bitmaps, user-defined marks, and others. There are many built-in features such as automatic handling of object creation, a toolbar that you can customize, attribute dialog boxes for each type of mark, built-in internationalization, among others. See Annotating Images for more information.

Updated 2/21/2018