2019 Retrospective: A Year in Electronic Document Management

As we’re (already) reaching the end of February 2020 (and I’m still not writing faster), it is more than time to release our 2019 retrospective. A lot of things happened the past year, so it’s time to update your ORPALIS product to the latest version, if you haven’t done it in a while!

To start with this retrospective, we’re going to list the top features of 2019 of our flagship products, GdPicture.NET and DocuVieware. You can find each feature in both toolkits, as DocuVieware is the extension of GdPicture.NET for Web development.

The overall winner of 2019 is our hyper-compression and optimization engine.
We have invested a lot of time and resources to develop and release a sophisticated engine that provides outstanding results.

We have also released a series of blog articles for those who want to dive deeper into the PDF optimization process:

• Introduction to the Optimization of Existing PDF files: Methods
• Lossless Methods: Optimization of Document Content
• Lossless Methods: Compression of Streams and Fonts
• Methods with Losses: JPEG 2000 and JBIG2
• Methods with losses: resizing, color detection, and other techniques
• MRC compression

Test our hyper-compression engine online here.

Through the year, we enhanced our OCR engine, and by the end of 2019, we were quite happy with the results, especially with documents with different writing directions and orientation, and text recognition on non-uniform backgrounds.

Our OCR engine now matches the performances (and often exceeds them on complex documents) of established competitors.

Test our OCR engine online here.

We didn’t have to wait for GDPR to have redaction needs, but the European law certainly made the demand for redaction features more pressing.
Since November, PDF redaction features are available in both GdPicture.NET and DocuVieware so you can remove sensitive content from your documents in a secure way.

Test our PDF redaction tool online here.

Like OCR, barcode recognition is always evolving because you can always find examples of scanned barcodes in horrific contexts.
Our barcoding specialists spent a lot of time improving detection and recognition in such contexts. We can thank the users who sent us these types of barcodes because it helped to enhance the 1D and 2D engines a lot!

Since 2018, we’re working hard on Office formats support.
In 2019 we released ODT and XLSX support.

Bonus: PowerPoint (.pptx) support has just been released last week! .doc, .xls, and .ppt are coming soon.

Test our Office formats converter online here.

Introducing .NET Core 3 in GdPicture.NET and DocuVieware

In a perfect synchronicity with Microsoft, in August we released native .NET Core 3 support for GdPicture.NET and DocuVieware.
We now have two GdPicture.NET assemblies to choose from, .NET for .NET 4.6 (which is also new) and .NET for .NET Core 3.

The PDF standard is evolving, and the latest version is now PDF 2.0.
There are many advantages to this version, in terms of security, accessibility, interactive objects support, and printing support. Learn more about PDF 2.0 in our article.

In June, we released a native PDF to PDF/A converter, which meets all the requirements for long-term archiving.

Test our PDF/A converter online here.

We have improved the accuracy of our forms processing engine that detects the content of a checkbox, fill-in-area, or any area where highlighting is required to indicate a certain choice.
If you are working with exam/application forms, you may want to check this tool.

With the rise of electronic invoicing worldwide, the need for processing and sharing structured and standardized electronic documents is growing.
You can generate and process various types of invoices with our SDK, like Zugferd and FacturX .
From Automatic Document Recognition, OCR and text extraction, to PDF/A conversion for long-term archiving, and more, GdPicture.NET includes all the tools you need to work with invoices.

You have noticed all the widgets we’re using to demonstrate our various updated engines. They are online microservices we developed for our new solution PassportPDF.

This solution answers the needs of companies who wish to use specific microservices in a SaaS model based on usage.

Our company aims to provide technology consumable in different ways while keeping the same quality level each time. PassportPDF answers the need of organizations that, for various reasons, cannot commit to buy a full licensed SDK upfront.

PassportPDF provides desktop apps for Windows, online tools, APIs, along with different SDKs to facilitate server communication. Anyone, individuals, professionals, people with or without development skills, can use PassportPDF microservices.

What’s interesting for our GdPicture.NET users is that the engines behind all the products are the same. It means that for instance, you will get the same hyper-compression results if you use AvePDF online tools, or if you integrate GdPicture.NET in your solution.

With PassportPDF, our goal is to offer all technologies covering the full lifecycle of any electronic document (acquisition, processing, analysis, conversion, storage), whatever the context and platform you choose.  

Who would have bet that PaperScan, which started as a GdPicture.NET demo, would become so successful over the years and rank #2 best scanning software of 2019-2020 by TechRadar?
First released in 2011, it has been a worldwide bestseller for many years, making ORPALIS a reference in the scanning industry.

In September and for the third year, we attended the BASTA! conference & expo in Mainz, Germany.
This event is the most important in Europe for the .NET developer community, and this year the focus was, of course, on .NET Core 3.
It’s always a pleasure for us to go to Germany and meet the developers and exhibitors.

We were very pleased to organize the first PDF Day France in Toulouse in April and welcome many PDF experts to talk about ISO standards, accessibility, long-term archiving, security and more.

We hope to renew this event in the future!

In June I had the chance to fly all the way to Seattle to attend the Electronic Document Conference in Adobe’s offices. On the agenda, PDF experts talked about challenges in redaction, accessibility, Office rendering, and lesser-known (but very convenient!) PDF features.
These types of events are always great to stay up-to-date with the industry, and to challenge (and as a consequence improve) our own products.

In January, our company ORPALIS brought PassportPDF to CES 2020.
Even if PDF and document management solutions are definitely not the stars of the show, companies and organizations are (still) in (desperate) need of comprehensives and all-inclusive solutions for their electronic documents.

Read more about the future of electronic documents in our blog article.

In January we opened an additional office in Toulouse. As we’re growing our team, we needed to have more space in a convenient place. We decided to choose a building where several startups share offices to benefit from a dynamic and creative environment in one of the city’s favorite areas (with one of the best rooftop views! https://www.athome-startup.fr).

You will be able to meet us in Germany again at the PDF Days Europe in April, where we will show how the PassportPDF Cloud ecosystem can resolves complex electronic documents issues.

We’re looking forward to meeting you there, in our offices in France, if you happen to be there (we do have very good coffee!), and of course, online on our various channels!

Cheers

Elodie