Changelog: Updates, milestones, roadmap

IronOCR Roadmap

We developed IronOCR to fill a market need, and it’s excelled as one of our leading products. Today we are continually shipping new feature requests, driven by community demand.

We actively work with Google’s latest Tesseract technology to drive stability and high accuracy. This ensures our customers are benefiting from the cutting edge OCR reading engine.

Our monthly releases see IronOCR continually prove its worth, and drive our mission to help end users move the .NET language forward.

We know IronOCR is one of the top choices developers make¹. To cement IronOCR as the leading product of its kind we are applying the latest technology to improve image filters, computer vision and machine learning.

Our next epic will be to launch IronOCR for multiple programming languages.

^{¹Based on a customer survey conducted in June 2022.}

June 2023

IronOCR v2023.6.6

May 29 2023

Version 2023.6.6

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2023.6.6

Release Notes:

Major Changes:

PostBuildEvent Runtime Folder Copy Fix: Resolved an issue related to copying the runtime folder during PostBuildEvent
Updates IronSoftware.System.Drawing to 2023.6.1

May 2023

IronOCR v2023.4.13

May 1, 2023

Version 2023.5.35

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2023.5.35

Release Notes:

Major Changes:

Fixes an issue where license keys would not be retrieved from web.config in some .NET Framework ASP.NET projects
Updates IronSoftware.System.Drawing to 2023.4.4

April 2023

IronOCR v2023.4.13

Apr 6, 2023

Version 2023.4.13

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2023.4.13

Release Notes:

Major Changes:

Updates IronSoftware.System.Drawing to 2023.3.3
Includes new ReadPdfAndOverlayText method on IronTesseract to add text and preserve original PDF bookmarks/annotations
Resolves an issue causing Searchable PDFs with many images to becomes large files
Fixes an issue where the Binarize filter made Searchable PDFs blank
Fixes issue where the Read method would create temp files and not clean them up
Adds support for the IronSuite license keys
Fixes issues with license keys stored in .config and .json files not being picked up by IronOCR
Adds support for license keys stored in .config and .json files in subfolders of the application

March 2023

IronOCR v2023.3.2

Mar 1, 2023

Version 2023.3.2

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2023.3.2

Release Notes:

Major Changes:

Adds compatibility for AWS (Amazon Linux)
Adds compatibility for various older Linux distributions
Improves reliability when reading text from PDFs
Improves speed and fidelity when creating searchable PDFs
Improves logic for finding language files
Removes dependency on System.Drawing

January 2023

IronOCR v2023.1.11644

Jan 18, 2023

Version 2023.1.11644

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2023.1.11644

Release Notes:

Major Changes:

Adds Installation.LanguagePackDirectory for specifying path to .ocrdata files
Fixes IronOcr for use with ClickOnce publishing and 'dotnet publish' command
Fixes some instances where language packs would fail to load
Fixes crop rectangle being ignored when reading from TIFF images
Fixes trial users not being able to read text from images
Allows single-threaded OCR reads (see IronTesseract.Multithreaded)

December 2022

IronOCR v2022.12.10830

Dec 5, 2022

Version 2022.12.10830

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2022.12.10830

Release Notes:

Major Changes:

Adds IronSoftware.System.Drawing to replace System.Drawing.Common in IronOCR
Removes internal dependency on System.Drawing.Common (see footnote [1] for more info)
Adds support for .NET 7
Removes support for .NET Framework 4. Minimum supported for .NET Framework is now version 4.6.2

Other Changes:

Improves support for many Linux Distros
Improves OcrFilters.DeNoise : Now reduces speckle noise.
Adds brand new OcrFilters to improve reading from noisy images:
Open : Filter that is useful for removing noise.
Close : Filter that is useful for closing small holes inside foreground objects.
AdaptiveThreshold : Applies a Bradley Adaptive Threshold to the image.

[1] Note about removal of System.Drawing.Common:

Microsoft has discontinued support for System.Drawing.Common on non-Windows for .NET 6, and completely for .NET 7 : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/core-libraries/6.0/system-drawing-common-windows-only
In order to handle this, we have developed an open-source library called IronSoftware.System.Drawing which easily translates between all the common types and formats that System.Drawing.Common did which will replace it
Customers who still want to use System.Drawing.Common with IronOCR will still be able to. IronSoftware.System.Drawing will work with this format but since System.Drawing.Common is no longer a dependency, usage will require the customer to add a `using System.Drawing.Common;` call in their code.

October 2022

IronOCR v2022.11.10109

Oct 26, 2022

Version 2022.11.10109

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2022.11.10109

Release Notes:

Fixes MAUI support
Fixes 'missing runtimes folder' error
Fixes 'missing libtesseract' error
Greatly improved compatibility and deployment on many platforms
Adds 'Installation.MachineLearningModelsDirectory' for specifying path to .onnx files
Minor bug fixes
Now supports installation via zip file or installer

September 2022

IronOCR v2022.10.9390

Sep 27, 2022

Version 2022.10.9390

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2022.10.9390

Release Notes:

Adds support for using machine learning technology to detect regions which may contain text
Adds OcrInput methods FindTextRegion and FindMultipleTextRegions - add the IronOcr.ComputerVision NuGet package for your platform
Adds OcrResult method SaveAsSearchablePdfStream for saving a result as a PDF stream
Updates Windows build to require fewer dependencies and use less disk space
Updates image loading to always remove color tables from images before performing OCR, improving accuracy
Fixes GetCropRectangleImage to work properly with all source image formats
Fixes issue with Installation.LoggingMode and LogFilePath not applying properly

August 2022

IronOCR v2022.8.8198

Aug 18, 2022

Version 2022.8.8198

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2022.8.8198

Release Notes:

Added new method for visualizing a crop rectangle on an image. See OcrInput.StampCropRectangleAndSaveAs()
Added new method for applying multiple filters at once. See OcrInput.ApplyMultipleFilters()
Changes Deskew filter to no longer throw an exception on failure
Improves compatibility on Windows systems which may not have Microsoft C++ redistributables installed
Improves compatibility on MacOs systems (both Intel and Apple Silicon) which may be missing certain imaging libraries

July 2022

IronOCR v2022.8.7804

Jul 26, 2022

Version 2022.8.7804

Features & Upgrades

https://www.nuget.org/packages/IronOcr/2022.8.7804

Release Notes:

Updates Tesseract to version 5.1
Adds support for Apple Silicon devices (MacOs on ARM processor)
Adds OcrInput.SaveAsImages() for saving input items as an image
Adds CropRectangle class which allows cropping using millimeter values or pixel values
Removes MinimumDpi. Please use TargetDpi to upscale your OCR input
Setting TargetDpi to null now prevents IronOcr from upscaling images, resulting in much smaller searchable PDFs
Fixes bug where Erosion filter applied Dialation and Dialation filter applied Erosion
Fixes bug where PDF pages were numbered incorrectly
Improves compatibility across various Linux distributions