ImageGear .NET v24.12 - Updated
User Guide

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.

This section provides overview information about the following ImageGear features:

Samples

ImageGear provides a variety of easy-to-use sample programs and images to help get you up and running quickly. You can use the provided sample images for any purpose, such as testing your applications as you develop them.

See Samples for a complete list of the samples available.

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).

Here are a few highlights:

PDF

ImageGear provides a comprehensive API, enabling you to read, write, display, edit, and annotate Portable Document Format (PDF)PostScript (PS), and Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) formats.  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:

In addition, your application will continue to support all ImageGear-supported file formats, allowing you to convert images to and from DICOM. See DICOM for details about using this functionality.

Digital Camera RAW

ImageGear supports reading raw images created by hundreds of 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 standard allows creating raw JPEG 2000 codestream files, as well as JP2-compatible files.

The JPEG 2000 Standard Part II defines the extended format 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, display, convert, and extract data from modern (docx, xlsx, and pptx) and legacy (doc, xls, and ppt) Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with the ImageGear.Formats.Office namespace enabled. 

For a list of all supported Office formats, see File Formats and Compressions.

ImageGear uses LibreOffice in the background to achieve high fidelity rendering. To interface with LibreOffice, the LibreOffice Instance Manager (LIM) background service 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 DWGDXF, and DGN. Common operations supported by the CAD API include:

See the CAD section for more information.

Additional Format Support

In addition, ImageGear supports the following:

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:

All of the above display attributes affect the display only. They do not alter either the image bitmap or the color palette in the DIB.

For more information, see Viewing.

Document Cleanup and Image Processing

ImageGear provides the following image processing and cleanup capabilities:

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.

ImageGear's OCR supports output in 8-bit ASCII and 16-bit Unicode text, Microsoft Word, HTML, PDF, and others.

The ImageGear Recognition Component also allows you to:

Scanning

ImageGear provides the following TWAIN and web-based scanning support:

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 and 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.