Technical FAQs

Does Accusoft Licensing Talk to Accusoft Servers at Runtime?

No, although if you run an Accusoft licensing utility (as opposed to an OEM key) that will communicate with the Accusoft servers to place a license on your machine. That’s it. When you run your code, network access to Accusoft servers is not necessary.

What are the best quality images to use when processing form data and recognition?

In order to add a new FormTableColumnHeaderDefinition to a FormTableDefinition object, first create a list of type FormTableColumnHeaderDefinition. Next, each FormTableColumnHeaderDefinition object is created and defined and added to this list using the Add method. Finally, this list is assigned to the FormTableDefinition’s ColumnHeaderDefinitions property.

// Create a table definition
FormTableDefinition tableDefinition = new FormTableDefinition();
tableDefinition.Name = "Line Item Table";

// Setup the columns of the table
List<FormTableColumHeaderDefinition> columnHeaderDefinitions = new List<FormTableColumnHeaderDefinition>();

FormTableColumnHeaderDefinition descriptionColumn = new FormTableColumnHeaderDefinition();
descriptionColumn.DataType = FormFieldDataType.GeneralText;
descriptionColumn.Name = "Description";
columnHeaderDefinitions.Add(descriptionColumn);

FormTableColumnHeaderDefinition amountColumn = new FormTableColumnHeaderDefinition();
amountColumn.DataType = FormFieldDataType.Currency;
amountColumn.Name = "Amount";
columnHeaderDefinitions.Add(amountColumn);

tableDefinition.ColumnHeaderDefinitions = columnHeaderDefinitions;

// Add the table definition to the form definition
formDefinition.TableDefinitions.Add(tableDefinition.Name, tableDefinition);

What are the best quality images to use when processing form data and recognition?

In all cases, you’ll want to have your images as clear and as clean as possible. For any particular procedure, please consider the following: OCR and ICR: Capture images in at least 300 DPI resolution. Ideally, working in black and white will allow the objects of interest on your image to be better defined and recognized. Free the image form all noise as much as possible. As if a human was reading it, you’ll want the text objects on the image to be as legible as possible. For ICR, make sure that the characters are printed (no cursive text, etc). Barcode recognition: As with OCR and ICR, capture images in at least 300 DPI and working with black and white content can provide excellent results. You’ll also want to make sure that the bars in the barcodes are clearly defined on the image and are not mal-formed (for example, the barcodes should have the proper start and stop sequence, etc). As always, clear as much noise from the image as possible. Forms matching and registration: As with the prior 2 items above, capture your documents in at least 300 DPI. Make sure that your resolution is consistent between your form templates and incoming batch images as well. Form templates should only contain data that is common to every image that is being processed (i.e. – Form fields, the text that appears on the blank form itself, etc). The template should not have filled-in field information as this will affect the forms matching process.

What are the differences between the compressions used in TIFF files?

The Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is widely popular, and is particularly used in document imaging. It can support a number of compression types:

• Packbits – Created by Apple, this lossless compression type is used for run-length encoding (RLE). Baseline TIFF readers must support this compression. Use this compression for higher compatibility with various applications.
• CCITT (Huffman encoding) – Used particularly for encoding bitonal (or bi-level) images. “Group 3” and “Group 4” are particularly known for its use with fax transmission of images. Using this compression type will help keep smaller file sizes.
• LZW – A lossless compression type that supports multiple bit depths. Because it’s lossless, it produces files that are generally larger than other compressions. Use this compression if you want to retain the exact visual quality of the image without data loss or artifacts.
• JPEG – Very popular compression, used for color and grayscale images and can produce high compression ratios. JPEG allows a good amount of control over how the image in question should be compressed. Use this compression for general color or grayscale images.
• Deflate – A lossless compression using Huffman and LZ77 techniques and also supports different bit depths.

What type of license should I be using?

Accusoft supports 3 primary license types: Evaluation, Toolkit, and Runtime licenses.

Evaluation License:

An Evaluation license is available upon download and will allow you to try our products and determine if they will suit your needs. Most downloads include free demo applications that demonstrate the core functionality of our product and will show you how to get up and running integrating Accusoft products with your solution. While the Evaluation license is free to download it does come with some restrictions. These restrictions may come in the form of water marked documents, pop-up dialogue boxes, or a time limit on the Evaluation license itself.

Toolkit License:

Should you decide that an Accusoft product is right for you, the next step should be to purchase one or more of our Toolkit licenses. Accusoft requires each developer using an Accusoft component to have a Toolkit license on their development machine. Once registered, the Toolkit license will unlock all restrictions of the Evaluation license. Please note, the Toolkit license is strictly to be used for development purposes, and when activated, it will be tied the specific development machine that it was registered on. Understandably, the occasion may arise where a Toolkit license needs to be moved from one development machine to another. In such a scenario, please contact sales@accusoft to see if this is feasible. For more information on how to register a Toolkit license on a development machine please see the ‘Toolkit Licensing’ section of your products Help documentation.

Runtime License:

Finally, once you have completed your solution and are ready for deployment, you will need to purchase a Runtime license. Accusoft offers 2 types of Runtime licenses. Most commonly, you will purchase an Automatically Reported Runtime (or Node-Locked) license, which requires a license for every machine your solution will be deployed to. It is very important to note that Runtime licenses are tied to the machine they are activated on and should not be used for development purposes. Doing so will quickly use up your Runtime licenses and cannot be refunded. For more information about how to activate an Automatically Reported Runtime license, please see the ‘Automatically Reported Runtime License’ section of your products Help documentation. In certain circumstances, Accusoft will issue a Manually Reported Runtime licenses that allow you to embed all of the licensing information directly into your application. These licenses are only distributed under certain circumstances and eligibility is determined by Accusoft sales. For more information on how to activate this type of license, please see the ‘Manually Reported Runtime License’ section of your products Help documentation.

When should I apply image cleanup operations on my document images?

There are a number of cleanup operations that you can use to make an image more suitable for a particular application. What you observe visually on the image and how you perceive its impact on your project is the most important. For example, if you’re noticing very many random specks on your image, and you’re planning to use OCR, then you may want to try a depseckle or blob removal operation first. If the content in your image looks a bit slanted, you could try a deskew or rotate operation. In some cases, using a line removal operation on forms that have grid fields could be helpful also. The amount of image cleaning you may need to do can very from project to project. There’s not a one shot cleaning operation that will always work for all images. But, observe the nature of the noise and interference in your images to determine what general parameters appear to provide the best results.

What browsers does PrizmDoc support?

Please refer to our latest documentation for the most up-to-date list of supported browsers:

• Supported Browsers

For documentation on older versions of PrizmDoc, please see our documentation archive.

Why am I unable to obtain a license using the License Manager?

One possibility is that you have strict firewall settings that are preventing our License Manager from connecting with licensing.accusoft.com, our licensing server. In order to connect with licensing.accusoft.com, you’ll have to make an exception in your firewall for our License Manager so that it can connect to licensing.accusoft.com on port 80 for http and port 443 for https.

What operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc.) does PrizmDoc officially support?

Please refer to our latest documentation for the most up-to-date list of supported operating systems:

• Supported Windows Operating Systems
• Supported Linux Operating Systems

For documentation on older versions of PrizmDoc, please see our documentation archive.

Why did my license stop working?

There are a couple reasons why a license might stop working. The most common would be if the MAC addresses changed (on a virtual machine, or after significant hardware change). Additionally, a temporary two week license can be put on a machine via the Server Licensing Utility if there are no licenses available when you license a machine. Feel free to contact us at marketing@accusoft.com if you have additional questions. If you want a new license please contact info@accusoft.com.

What are the absolute essentials for embedding the PrizmDoc Viewer into my web page/application?

Viewer API (viewercontrol.js)

The Viewer API is the base building block of the Viewer. We ensure that API changes are backward compatible with point releases (for example, PrizmDoc v13.5 → PrizmDoc v13.6) and will not introduce breaking changes unless critical. With major releases we also endeavor to ensure backward compatibility with previous releases of the Viewer API.

HTML Templates (viewerCustomization.js) and CSS (viewercontrol.css, viewer.css)

The Viewer that is shipped with the product will be maintained and enhanced from release to release. The Viewer HTML and CSS markup will change with each release. Once you have begun to modify your markup, it is recommended that you consider subsequent PrizmDoc releases as sample code, in which you would evaluate product changes and choose to incorporate all or parts of those changes into your customization.

JavaScript files (viewer.js)

The Viewer JavaScript that lies above the Viewer API is unobfuscated and open for customization. While we expect many developer needs will be satisfied through configuration parameters and minor HTML or styling changes, some developers will desire to modify viewer.js for more advanced customization. You should carefully consider your development and ongoing maintenance strategy to ensure that future releases of PrizmDoc are easy to integrate into your customizations. We cannot guarantee backward compatibility of viewer.js in future releases as it is central to the functionality of the Viewer.

For information on integrating PrizmDoc Viewer, see the Getting Started section of the documentation.

For more in depth customization, see the PrizmDoc Customization section of the documentation.