Image and Document Imaging Development Toolkits
Version number:

DownloadDownload

Black Ice Software provides a variety of Imaging Toolkits designed to meet a range of application requirements. With support for a range of file formats and compressions, as well as advanced scan and capture technology, fast display zoom rotate, and a range of image processing options, the Black Ice Imaging Toolkits provide an ideal, easy to use interface to harness cutting edge imaging technology within your application.

Available Imaging Toolkits

Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX

Includes all of the features of the above toolkits plus PDF reading/writing, over 60 powerful filters and effects, 300+ advanced printing functions, as well as document imaging functionality such as punchhole removal, despeckling, deskewing, and more.

Barcode SDK/ActiveX

Enables the encoding/decoding of 1D and 2D barcode symbols.

IceViewer HTML5 Viewer

The HTML5 Document Viewing solution can be embedded or integrated with many in-house applications, including existing HR, CRM, ERM, Transportation, or Shipping applications to access documents in your database.

For document conversion and image generation, please consider the following:

Black Ice Printer Drivers

Create document images from any windows application which can print, either programmatically or via user intervention. Integrate a Black Ice printer driver into your application for cutting edge document conversion.

For an overview of the Black Ice imaging development toolkits and to determine which product(s) are right for you, please click here.

For more information about upgrading, please download the following file: Upgrading to Imaging Tools SDK 12.

Summary of Black Ice Imaging Functionality:

Display

Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX includes a very powerful feature that makes displaying images to any display device easy. The display feature included in Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX provides an easy-to-use solution for developers. Application developers now do not have to spend expensive engineering time implementing complicated display routines. It only takes a few function calls and the Black Ice display routine will do the rest.

Annotation

A complete set of easy-to-use APIs and UI controls to help software engineers to add annotation and markup objects, such as Editable Textbox, Editable Multiline-Textbox, Signature, Date and Time, Checkbox, Hyperlink, Tooltip, 1D and 2D Barcodes, Line, Arrow, Arrow shape, text, graphics, images, stamps and sticky notes to a document in a shorter timeframe. For more details about Annotation SDK please click here.

File formats

Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX supports all the major file formats, from complex editable TIFF and PDF to simple JPEG and BMP files. Document Imaging SDK can help create industry-standard TIFF Group 4, Group 3 1D, Group 3 2D TIFF, and PDF files. The TIFF and JPEG libraries developed by Black Ice Software are one of the first and most extensive TIFF and JPEG file format processing and encoding/decoding libraries available on the market.

PDF File Format Support

The Black Ice PDF library enables the viewing, displaying, printing, saving, and converting of any Editable/Vector PDF document and PDF Forms files. Text extraction and text search for editable PFDs without OCR. Any document type can be converted into PDF format type supported by the Black Ice imaging toolkits.

Compression

Supports all of the popular data compression methods used in Imaging.

OCR Image Processing

Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX provides the OCR solution to transform scanned documents and images into editable searchable text files. Our OCR is fast and accurate and ensures the document's content remains intact. The ability to instantly search through content is extremely useful, especially in an office setting that has to deal with high volume scanned or fax document inflow.

TWAIN scanner support

Scanning support is based on the latest TWAIN 2.0 and 1.9 drivers. With the latest TWAIN drivers, application developers have total control over almost every aspect of the scanning process. Using the SDK, developers can switch between document feeders to perform batch scanning or automated scanning for newer scanners.

Printing

The Black Ice Imaging tools provide an easy way to print images in single or multiple print jobs with a wide variety of options. When printing, today’s applications not only want to create a paper copy of an image file but also want to specify the way in which the image will be printed. The image has to be positioned on the paper according to a predefined location, printed with its original size or stretched to a specific size. Some applications even require printing more than one image on the same page so the amount of paper wasted would be minimal. Black Ice imaging tools provide several powerful options to meet these needs.

Document Image Processing

Image processing functions are used to make images look better or correct and remove visual artifacts from images. These image processing functions can be used together with filters and effects to produce a better overall result. Document Imaging SDK implements several image-processing methods that can provide solutions to problems that happen during image acquisition such as faxing, scanning and photography. Some of the most widely used features are available in the Document Imaging SDK:

Fax Image Processing

One very important area where image processing is commonly used is faxing. During faxing image files are being transferred from one device to another. The format, the size and the resolution of the image file that can be transferred is specified by the fax standard and by the device (i.e. fax board) that will transmit the file.

UNICODE file name support

UNICODE file name support ensures the usability of foreign languages and special characters in the filenames when using the Black Ice Barcode SDKs.

Web Applications

Black Ice Software’s IceViewer combined with the Document Imaging SDK can be used to build a web-server-based application to view, edit, annotate, OCR, download, print, scan, and email PDF, TIFF, or FAX documents from any desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone with a simple web browser. See the IceViewer.

Database

The Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX allows developers to process images in memory and also provides functionality which allows developers to quickly and easily index their application within a specified ODBC database. You can use the database features to store images in any of the file formats supported by the Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX and the database support includes a variety of callback routines and features multipage support.

Color Depth Conversion

The Color Depth Conversion functions implement features that change the way that colors are represented in images. Today’s devices represent colors in many different ways. Some devices, such as printers, accept 1 bit monochrome images, others accept 24 bit full color images. Converting a color image to black and white is called halftoning or clustered-dot ordered dither in computer graphics. 9 sophisticated dithering algorithms are available, some of them only available from Black Ice such as Stevenson Arce dithering.

Color Space Conversion

The Color Space Conversion functions implement features that change the way that colors are represented in images. Today’s devices represent colors in many different ways. Some devices, such as printers accept 1 bit monochrome images, others accept 24 bit full color images. But there is also a difference in the methods used to encode colors. Some devices, like display devices, work with the RGB color space. Others devices, such as printers, may use the CMYK colors space. The Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX has over 60 color space conversion functions, which can be grouped into three sets of functions. There is a group of function to convert a Device Independent Bitmap, a group to convert buffers and a group to convert a single pixel to any of the color spaces. Black Ice imaging tools currently support the following 9 color spaces: RGB, CMY, CMYK, HIS, HSV, L*a*b, XYZ, YIQ, YUV.

Transformations

Image transformations such as rotations, inversions, etc., are important and one of the most widely used components of any imaging toolkit. Image transforms produce results quickly without degrading the quality of the image.

Common Dialogs

Black Ice imaging tools include 55 common dialog boxes for developers. The common dialog boxes are optional and were designed to drastically reduce user interface development time. There are 37 common dialogs for filters and in addition, there are common dialogs for image processing features such as Red Eye Removal, Selective Color, Brightness, Contrast, and Gamma Correction.

Effects and Filters

Effects and filters are designed to change the appearance of an image by applying sophisticated mathematical algorithms to the image. The Document Imaging SDK includes almost 50 different filters and effects that provide developers access to image processing tools that could take years to develop.

Text Processing

Black Ice imaging tools include a wide variety of text processing functions that can be very helpful in many different application areas.

64-bit support

The Black Ice Imaging Toolkits include 64 bit support from Version 12.00. 64 bit support ensures that the benefits of 64-bit hardware is fully obtained.