Microsoft Document Imaging Format MDI Information

Microsoft Office Document Imaging uses Microsoft Document Imaging Format MDI, a file format based on the Tagged Image File Format, commonly known as TIFF. TIFF is a high resolution, tag based graphics format. TIFF is used for the universal exchange of digital graphics. MDI is designed to store images by page layout. In Office Document Imaging, you can open and save files in the MDI format as well as the TIFF format. Both formats are capable of storing text recognized by optical character recognition (OCR). OCR translates images of text, such as scanned documents, into actual text characters. OCR is also sometimes referred to as text recognition.

While you can open and edit TIFF files created with Office Document Imaging by using many other graphics and document imaging applications, MDI files can only be opened and edited in Office Document Imaging. If you are planning to share your files with people who are using Office Document Imaging 2002 or older, or another document imaging program; you should save your files in TIFF format for compatibility.

In general, images that are saved in Microsoft Document Imaging Format MDI take up less disk space than the same images if they were saved as TIFF files. The image quality of an image saved in the MDI file format is generally comparable to that of the same image saved in TIFF. So MDI is useful for saving disk space while not sacrificing the quality of your document images.

There are various times within Office Document Imaging when you can choose the file format (either MDI with an .mdi extension or TIFF with a .tif extension) for your document: When scanning a document, the scanning preset you choose determines the format the scanned document is saved in. You can create your own scanning preset or edit an existing pre-set to change the file format. When saving a document you can select the file format in the Save As Type list in the Save As dialog box when you save the file. Finally when importing a document , the File Import preferences button on the Other tab in the Options dialog box (in the Tools menu) allows you to select the default file format for documents that you import from other programs.

Saving in the Microsoft Document Imaging Format MDI is a great way to save space if you use MS Office Document Imaging. If you save a lot of document images your business could benefit from the increased storage capacity tremendously. Remember the compatibility issues however; it may not be the best choice for those who use Linux due to its lack of a native version of MS Office.