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About Microsoft Document Imaging Format (MDI)

Microsoft Office Document Imaging uses Microsoft Document Imaging Format (MDI), a file format based on the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) that 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 Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) format. Both formats are capable of storing text recognized by optical character recognition (OCR) along with images.

File format comparison

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

MDI files have the following advantages over TIFF files:

• Reduced file size    Images that are saved in the MDI file format take up less disk space than the same images saved in the TIFF format.
• Improved image fidelity    Images saved in the MDI file format are generally higher fidelity (or quality) than the same images saved in the TIFF (with the Perform lossless compression (LZW). option selected) format.

File format selection

There are different 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:

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 preset to change the file format.

Saving a document    You can select the file format in the Save as type list in the Save As dialog box when you save a file.

Importing a document    The File Import preferences button on the Other tab in the Options dialog box (Tools menu) allows you to select the default file format for documents that you import from other programs.

Technical details