About Keil IT
Keil IT is an IT solutions company based in Germany. They help their clients with a wide range of IT matters, from a server and network installation, maintenance and monitoring, to email services and hosting. They also offer IT consultancy and bespoke development. Keil IT has also developed BarcodeOCR, a barcode processing software.
BarcodeOCR is software that automatically recognizes barcodes in documents and images and helps companies process scanned documents without user intervention. BarcodeOCR supports all major barcode formats and by adding it to a workflow, companies can speed up their document management by automating recognition and sorting. It is fast, accurate and easy.
BarcodeOCR reads barcode information from scanned documents and processes them automatically.
Goals
Keil IT had a solution that achieved BarcodeOCR’s main purpose including automatic barcodes recognition and document splitting. But, wanted to improve its software so that it could:
- Generate PDF/A compliant documents.
- Process documents in parallel, to allow customers to process more documents in the same timeframe.
- Support more barcodes.
- Modify PDF metadata.
- Support PDF 1.7.
- Support ASP.NET and WebServices.
- Simplify development and maintenance
When looking for solutions, we came across Aspose and became interested in Aspose.BarCode for .NET and Aspose.PDF for .NET.
Solution
Initially, Keil IT tried Aspose.PDF for .NET which immediately extended its PDF format support and added metadata editing capabilities to BarcodeOCR. Furthermore, the addition of Aspose.BarCode for. NET to the set-up also extended its barcode recognition capabilities and allowed Keil IT to extend its platform support to ASP.NET and WebServices. Aspose’s .NET components support these platforms seamlessly.
As well as making it easy to generate, split and tag PDF files, Aspose.PDF for .NET helped Keil IT reach other goals. Aspose.PDF for .NET is the only easy-to-use component that Keil IT has seen which allowed them to convert files to PDF/A compliant files.
Extensive support for PDF versions
Most of Keil IT’s users scanned documents to PDF 1.3 or 1.4 but some of them wanted to process documents that have been generated using Adobe Acrobat, PDF 1.7. So with the use of Aspose.PDF for .NET, PDF 1.7 was automatically supported.
Working in tandem, the two components provided parallel computing, and the resulting software processed over twice as many documents as the previous versions. This improved the software’s throughput enormously and resulted in a great benefit to Keil IT’s users.
Coding Benefits
Good, clean code is something every development team appreciates. It is important that code is easy to maintain and understand. Aspose’s components are well documented and are designed to be compact and easy to work with.
Dennis Alexander Petrasch, head developer at Keil IT, said: “Aspose.BarCode for .NET is a truly written managed code and gives us a variety of barcode types to handle all kinds of document recognition and further processing”. The implementation is compact and understandable which saves time when adding features or fixing issues.
A release of BarcodeOCR that used Aspose.PDF for .NET and Aspose.BarCode for .NET was released in summer 2013.
Experience
Keil IT chose to work with Aspose because of the components they are using, Aspose.PDF for .NET and Aspose.BarCode for .NET, helped them achieve a number of goals, from wider barcode support and PDF version support to an easy-to-maintain code base. These are not the only reasons:
- The documentation flattens the learning curve and includes lots of examples that made using the products easy.
- When things didn’t go quite to plan, Priority Support means that the developers that designed the products are on hand with excellent support.
- When issues were found in the software, they were fixed quickly.
Summary
Keil IT was looking for products to improve BarcodeOCR. They wanted to support a wider range of barcodes and PDF file formats, change PDF metadata and improve the processing capabilities of its software.
With Aspose.BarCode for .NET and Aspose.PDF for .NET, those goals were met and Keil IT’s users got an even better product. Great documentation and Technical support ensured that Keil IT could get on with their work and integrate the new components quickly.