COMPANY NEWS

IronOCR Hits 5 Million NuGet Downloads, Thank You, Developers!

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Iron Software is proud to announce a significant milestone: IronOCR has officially exceeded 5 million downloads on NuGet. This achievement reflects a decade of consistent growth and, more importantly, the trust that thousands of developers and organizations worldwide place in IronOCR to deliver high-performance Optical Character Recognition within their .NET applications.

Steady Growth Over Time

Since its release, IronOCR has shown remarkable consistency and growth:

Sustained adoption at this scale, maintained over a full decade, only happens when developers consistently achieve production-ready results. That ongoing trust from the .NET community is something we are proud of.

Why Developer Trust IronOCR

IronOCR offers an incredible experience for .NET developers needing accurate text recognition without the hassle of complex setup or external dependencies. Unlike many open-source alternatives, IronOCR includes:

  • Built-in support for scanned PDFs and images
  • Auto-detection of languages, rotation, and low-quality scans
  • Read images, PDFs and structured documents
  • 125+ languages and filters
  • Export structured data, text, hOCR and searchable PDFs

IronOCR’s Milestones in 2025

Over the course of 2025, significant improvements have been made to our OCR engine to enhance performance, expand functionality, and reduce resource usage. Below is a summary of key milestone:

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  • v2025.2 - 30% faster OCR, 40% lower memory usage for Read() / SaveAsSearchablePdf()
  • v2025.5 - Support for high-resolution images
  • v2025.8 - 4 new AdvancedScan methods for better preprocessing
  • v2025.9 - Reduce memory usage for large image OCR
  • v2025.11 - English handwriting recognition
  • v2025.12 - SaveAsSearchablePdf() support for OcrPhotoResult and OcrDocAdvancedResult

2026 (Planned): Taking IronOCR Further

IronOCR has already evolved beyond traditional OCR. In 2026, we're taking the next leap forward with a completely reimagined engine.

Expect faster performance, improved accuracy, and a modern backend, all without sacrificing the offline, no-cloud model developers rely on.

And for the first time, we’re going beyond .NET, expanding IronOCR to support Python, Node.js, Java, and more.

Whether you're building for web, desktop, or hybrid cloud environments, this update is built for you.

Stay tuned.

Recognizing Handwritten Text with IronOCR

While printed text is common, many real-world documents still include handwritten content from notes and forms to survey responses and legacy records. Recognizing handwriting accurately has traditionally been one of OCR’s hardest challenges.

IronOCR now supports English handwriting recognition, making it easier to extract meaningful text from these kinds of sources.

You don’t need to train a model or configure complex pipelines. IronOCR handles handwriting out of the box, using its enhanced OCR engine with built-in image correction and character segmentation optimized for handwritten forms.

Handwriting OCR Best Practices:

  • Works best with printed or block-style handwriting
  • Avoid cursive or stylized scripts (this remains a known OCR limitation)
  • Use grayscale or high-contrast images for better accuracy
  • Supported via the ReadHandwriting() and ReadHandwritingAsync() methods

In testing, IronOCR achieved 90%+ confidence scores on clean handwriting samples, reliably identifying key phrases and content. While it may still struggle with spacing or cursive, the engine extracts the core message with strong accuracy.

See full handwriting OCR tutorial

From the Developer Community

Every day, developers use IronOCR to solve complex document processing challenges, automating invoice extraction, processing identification documents, indexing scanned archives, and building intelligent data pipelines. The versatility and reliability of the library make it a natural fit for workflows where accuracy and performance are non-negotiable.

"IronOCR just works out of the box. Incredibly easy to use and highly accurate." - Developer review on G2

Feedback like this reinforces why we continue investing in IronOCR's development: developers need tools that deliver results without unnecessary complexity.

Check out more.

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A Huge Thank You to the Developer Community

To every developer who has downloaded, tested, implemented, and recommended IronOCR: thank you. Hitting 5 million downloads is a massive milestone and it’s only the beginning. We're excited to continue improving IronOCR and supporting your projects with world-class OCR tools built for .NET.

Haven’t Tried IronOCR Yet?

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