ImagXpress Document

What's New in ImagXpress V9.0
The components within the ImagXpress v9 SDK are updated to provide greater usability, functionality, flexibility, and performance.

Features Include:

Additional File Format Support

• AutoCAD 2000 - DWG, DXF, DXB, DWF
• HD Photo (JPEG XR) - HDP, WDP
• More Camera RAW Formats
• PTOCA – IBM’s AFP format with Presentation Text
• ABIC– IBM compression format for check images
• IPTC metadata support within TIFF and JPEG files
• TIFF with intrinsic orientation (the file itself contains a rotation angle that can be interpreted during display)
• JPEG 2000 images within PDFs
• Compress to PSNR value in JPEG 2000 (to specify the amount of compression by quality rather than by target file size)
• JPEG 2000 multithreading support for faster compression & decompression

Improved Rendering

• Enhanced ability to load and process large images and files
• Improved viewing of large PDF or CAD images

Query from Memory

• Query image data (e.g. tags) from memory buffer or IO.Stream without loading the entire image
• Save image data (e.g. tags) to memory buffer or IO.Stream without saving the entire image

New XML and XFDF Annotation Support

• XML multi-page support for import and export of annotations via file or memory
• PDF annotation import and export using XFDF via file or memory
• Use with PDF Xpress to annotate PDF files

New Annotation Features

• Note tool
• Block highlight tool
• Tooltip text support for individual annotations
• Custom cursors
• New arrowheads
• Improved autosizing

Improved Unicode Support

• Annotations
• File names
• Text
• Printing
• TWAIN Scanning

Enhanced TWAIN Scanning & Capture Support

• New object-oriented .NET interface
• Access to device’s capability settings and configuration dialog
• Ability to maintain scanner settings for each session
• JPG, J2K, JBIG2, TIFF-G4 compression types added to PDF save
• TIFF write optimization (faster to write large multi-page TIFFs)
• TW_STR32 type support
• Save to stream or buffer
• Unicode support

Enhanced Thumbnail Image Support

• Directory drill down
• Drag and drop thumbnails within and between thumbnail windows, and from other applications
• Programmatic scrolling
• Mousewheel support
• Keyboard navigation
• Load thumbnails from memory buffer or IO.Stream
• Save thumbnail image as Bitmap, HBitmap, or Picture object
• Set component, cell, text, and background colors
• Associate user-defined data with thumbnail images
• Generate thumbnails of CAD images

Improved Printing Support

• New object-oriented .NET interface
• Unicode support
• Enhanced access – select printer by name

New User Interface Features

• Smooth scroll
• Mouse wheel support
• Custom cursors

Easier Integration with Pegasus Imaging’s ISIS Xpress Toolkit

• ISIS scanning and image capture is now included in the download and available for purchase separately as an add-on. Sample code is included

What's New in V8.0

• Improved .NET Support - The ImagXpress, NotateXpress, and ThumbnailXpress .NET components use a newly designed object-oriented interface. These components are fully compliant with .NET 1.0 and above. The documentation for these components is fully integrated with Visual Studio
• New Thumbnail Control - ThumbnailXpress provides developers with an easy, flexible, memory-friendly way to add thumbnail image display to applications. ThumbnailXpress is delivered as both a .NET component and COM control
• Enhanced Document Imaging Features - ImagXpress v8.0 builds on previous technology to offer further enhanced document image processing features, including a subset of Pegasus Imaging's ScanFix technology
• New Photo Editing Features - Includes Advanced Auto Red Eye Removal, Alpha Channel Support and Advanced Auto Color Correction and Auto Lightness Correction
• New Compression and File Formats - Includes support for 9 to 16 Bit Gray TIFF, vendor-Specific Camera RAW Formats, TIFF JPEG Compression Type 7 and WSQ Fingerprint Decompression Added as Standard
• New Annotation Features - Includes .ANN Annotation File Format Support and Medical Annotation Data Locking

Available in four editions;

• Photo - includes ImagXpress, NotateXpress, TwainPRO, PrintPRO, and ThumbnailXpress
• Document (formerly Professional in V7) - includes ImagXpress, NotateXpress, TwainPRO, PrintPRO, and ThumbnailXpress
• View - includes ImagXpress, NotateXpress (Viewing functionality only), PrintPRO, and ThumbnailXpress
• Standard - includes ImagXpress and TwainPRO

Technical Notes

• Programming environments: Win32 visual development environments
• Sample code is included for: VB.NET, C#, VB, Delphi, VC++, HTML, Access
• Deploys within .NET as a managed control and is fully compliant with .NET 1.0 and above
• Can be used in any development environment that hosts ActiveX/COM controls
• Includes 5 controls: ImagXpress, NotateXpress, TwainPRO, ThumbnailXpress, PrintPRO
• Optimized for speed
• Client/server Web development capabilities
• Streaming image support from the Internet, allowing progressive image viewing online
• Increased image processing speed available via an easy to use multiple image buffering mechanism
• Synchronous or asynchronous multi-threaded control
• BLOB database support

Compression & File Formats

• Over thirty image formats are supported from files, memory and URLs
• Read and write multi-page TIFF, PDF, ICO, DCX, and MO:DCA images
• Multi-page TIFF support, including compacting of multiple page files, TIFF tag editing, Wang TIFF annotation compatibility, and 9 to 16-bit grayscale
• TIFF format support includes Group 3 and Group 4, JPEG, JPEG Type 7, CCITT RLE, LZW, Pack Bits, and Deflate
• Multi-page PDF support (embedded image PDF only - containing bitonal, grayscale, and color image data) including adding new pages into existing PDF files, and viewing pages from PDF files
• Full Adobe PDF support is available by adding on the PDFXpress toolkit
• Read and write single-page PDF, TIFF, JPG, GIF, RAW, BMP, WBMP, PNG, DCX, DIB, PIC, PBM, PCX, PGM, PPM, TGA, ICO, RLE, and more
• Read WSQ and WMF image files
• JPEG 2000, lossless JPEG, JPEG-LS, JBIG2, and WSQ compression support available as add ons
• EXIF tag editing
• Support for 1, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32-bit images
• Support for 2 to 16-bit grayscale images, including window leveling
• Beyond 8-bit, grayscale lossy JPEG image compression and decompression
• Password protect images using .pic, a Pegasus Imaging Corporation format that allows greater compression and password capability. These files require Pegasus Imaging products to view and manipulate them

Thumbnail Image Support

• An easy, flexible, memory-friendly way to add thumbnail image display is provided by the included ThumbnailXpress control
• Support a wide range of file formats (all those supported by ImagXpress and PDFXpress)
• Multi-Page Image Support
• Display thumbnails of directories and/or multi-page image files
• Filter the contents of directories based on attributes such as file name, extension, date and time or size
• Rapid Display
• Generate thumbnails asynchronously to provide the fastest display of thumbnail images possible
• Cache thumbnail images for quick scrolling and redisplay
• Caching support provides options to control the amount of memory used
• Horizontal or Vertical Scrolling
• Create thumbnails in either vertical or horizontal mode (only one scroll bar will be active)
• Scroll bar methods and events are available for creating custom solutions
• Set the size of the container for thumbnail images
• Flexible Captions
• Set thumbnail display options, including spacing between thumbnails, border width, border color, background color and painting order
• Set labels displayed with each thumbnail, either by automatically deriving from filenames, or programmatically controlled.
• Take advantage of extensive font formatting options
• Flexible Image File Selection
• Select one or multiple thumbnails using the mouse
• Create custom actions using mouse methods and events
• Retrieve information about the thumbnail image including its height, width, and current status
• Retrieve the name of the original image used to create the thumbnail

Document Image Processing and Editing

• Comprehensive set of over 80 image processing functions
• Automated 1 bpp image cleanup
• Configurable Binarization and Half Toning
• Anti-alias and scale to gray
• Advanced merging capabilities
• Autocrop
• Automatic Deskew - Automatically detect and remove skew from bitonal images. Detection focuses on the content of the image, such as text and drawings, rather than the border. You can also specify acceptable skew angle, quality, and confidence levels
• Despeckle - Use advanced technology to remove specks from bitonal images, including specification of speck size and reporting of number of specks removed
• Line Removal - Remove lines of defined size, thickness, and other specifications, from bitonal images. Report the number of lines removed
• Dilate - Add black pixels to extend objects vertically, horizontally, or diagonally
• Erode - Remove black pixels from objects in bitonal images vertically, horizontally, or diagonally
• Smooth Zoom - Enhance character clarity, using Smooth Zoom. Replace an image with a new image with width and height doubled and with pixels smoothed
• Shear - Apply rotation of bitonal images, along only the vertical or horizontal axis, by the specified angle in degrees. Allow the user to specify the color with which to pad the image
• Hole Punch & Blob Removal - Locate and remove all black blobs (e.g. hole punch marks) in bitonal images, within a defined search area, based on size or density. Detect and report the number of blobs found within the search area
• Blank Page Detection - Automatically determine that a page is blank within a set of bitonal images, by detecting if no objects are found to exceed the minimum object dimension. A border (top margin, left margin, right margin, bottom margin) within which to test for blank page, and minimum confidence, can be specified
• Border Crop - Remove the black border around a bitonal image
• "Preserve Dark" Detail Enhancement
• Ideal for enhancing thumbnail images or images that are zoomed out
• Preserve the dark pixels of an image when an image is scaled at ratios less than 1:1 (many pixels are averaged for the one displayed)
• Avoid losing details in fine lines or fine text
• Retention of image transparency
• Color anti-aliasing and smoothing for zoomed
• Adjust contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, gamma, and more (Display adjustment of contrast, brightness, and gamma)
• 24, 8, 4, and 1-bit color depth conversions with advanced palette control
• Area and region processing

TWAIN Scanning

• Acquire images from TWAIN scanners and digital cameras
• Data source enumeration and selection
• Enable/disable data source user interface
• Multiple image acquisition
• Read and Write basic G3/G4 TIFF, JPEG, BMP and PackBits
• FTP upload capability
• Specify image resolution, image scaling, units, and color depth
• Negotiate for all standard device features such as image dimensions, location and resolution
• Negotiate for optional device features such as: autofeeder enabling, brightness, contrast, image layout/frame, maximum image transfers, progress indicators, resolution, scaling, and units
• Scan images faster and use less memory by transferring images from the data source in either Native or Buffered Memory transfer mode
• Provides support for advanced TWAIN capabilities like barcode or patchcode detection and compressed data transfer directly from the scanner
• Reduce data transferred between the scanner and the PC by transferring images from high-end scanners using the scanner's built-in compression
• Catch illegal operations from errant TWAIN Data Sources before they crash the application. TwainPRO will return an error back to the application letting the application safely exit or continue

Tools

• Built in tools with the ability to reassign key sequences to different tools, including hand tool, magnifying glass, pan and zoom, rubber band, rectangle (area and region), elliptical and free hand selection
• Create customized interactive toolbar
• Right click pop up menu, including image information dialog, tool selection, zoom
• Automated support to maintain the Aspect Ratio for images with differing horizontal and vertical resolutions
• Multiple image scaling algorithms
• Advanced scrollbar and autosize features
• Capture the contents of any window or section of any window
• Built in timer with TimerTick event
• Image property interface
• Programmable image alignment within the control
• 1/1000 degree rotation increments

Annotation

• Fully-programmable annotation support through NotateXpress
• Add annotation and redaction capability to applications
• Standard annotation objects include ruler, freehand, text, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, line, polyline, image and rubber-stamp
• Create, display, save, restore, and password-protect annotations in independent layers
• Brand annotations into images
• Print annotations with the image
• Add, delete, query, and manipulate annotation elements programmatically
• Read and write the Wang/Kodak TIFF annotation format, and store all annotations in either TIFF files or in external files
• Unicode (double-byte) characters are supported for languages with extended character sets
• Supports opaque, translucent, and fully transparent backgrounds for notations
• Supports opaque and translucent notations, useful for watermarking
• Multiple layer support
• .ANN annotation file format support (a proprietary format of TMSSequoia that was used in the ViewDirector SDK, providing a clear upgrade path to ImagXpress, and allowing for conversion from .ANN to the corresponding NotateXpress type)
• Lock and unlock annotation data to the control rather than the image, enabling navigation of medical images (and others) without moving the annotations, such as patient name and ID

Printing

• Advanced printing support through PrintPRO
• Add printing features to applications with just a few lines of code
• Create a custom printing interface for Internet Explorer to bypass I.E.'s printing interface
• Print Preview is provided
• Print to File, including multi-page TIFF and multi-page PDF output (containing G4 compressed image data)
• Print text and graphic bitmaps
• Print binary data
• Print formatted and unformatted text, rotated text, graphics, margins, and any number of images on one or more pages
• Text Capabilities - Set properties including location, alignment, font, rotation, attributes, color, background transparency and more
• Set font objects in containers like Visual C++ using the Font Method
• Graphics Capabilities - Line, point, circle, ellipse, rectangle, rounded rectangle, curve, arc, polygon, pie shapes and more
• Provides complete control over how the graphics are drawn and filled including draw mode, draw style, width, fill color, and fill style
• Printer Property Capabilities - View and change printer properties including the bin, paper size, print quality, orientation, duplex mode, etc.
• Supports single and multi-page documents
• Cancel print jobs that have been previously sent to the printer
• Provides access to the printer's device context (DC) for custom control
• Print single or multiple Device Independent Bitmaps (DIB) and Device Dependent Bitmaps (DDB) on any page
• Bitmaps can be resized inside a rectangular area with or without maintaining the aspect ratio
• Automatically maintain the bitmap's aspect ratio to print large images at any size
• Set the system default printer
• Select and set up a printer from a dialog box or query system printers
• Print images transparently
• Print collages, including precise placement of borders and other images by specifying pixels, twips, points, millimeters, centimeters, character or inches