Microsoft Office Document Imaging uses the 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. 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 format.

You can import files that were created in other programs directly into Microsoft Office Document Imaging, creating in effect a scanned document from an existing file. You can share files with other people who use Microsoft Office Document Imaging, and even get their comments or feedback in the file, even if they don't have the program that was used to create the file. And you can do this as simply as opening a file.

When you are reviewing a Microsoft Office Document Imaging document, you can use annotations to mark up your document. You can add text as a note or comment, apply highlighting to important text, draw freeform text or shapes to circle text in question, or insert a picture in your document by using the buttons on the Annotations toolbar.

Picture added as an annotation

Highlighting applied to call out important information

Freeform shape drawn to call attention to a detail

Text added as a comment for a reviewer

You can:

• Move, resize, and remove annotations.
• Select the font and background color (if any) for text you add to your document.
• Choose the thickness and color of ink for the pens you use to add highlighting and drawings.
• Make your annotations a permanent part of your document.
• Print your document with or without annotations.

When you are viewing your document in the page pane, you can select from the following options on the View menu:

• Single page   view and scroll through your document one page at a time.
• Continuous Page   view and scroll through the pages as one continuous document.
• Two Pages   view two pages side-by-side on the screen and scroll through your document two pages at a time.

Optical character recognition (OCR) now includes support for the following:

• document layout information such as font type and font size is captured and stored along with the raw text
• pictures and simple tables are recognized
• text in East Asian languages is recognized

In addition, you can now perform OCR on a page by page basis. You can select only the page or pages you want to perform OCR on, or you can perform OCR only on pages that OCR has not been run on yet. This saves you time when you only need to recognize a portion of text in your document, or if you need to recognize text in a different language on only a few pages.

In addition to sending a document to someone as an attachment in e-mail, you can also send a document to a fax service.

Microsoft Office Document Imaging supports Automation. A programmer can use a number of different programming languages, for example Visual Basic, C++, or VBScript, to manipulate exposed objects by invoking methods on the object or by getting and setting the object's properties. Office Document Imaging exposes a document object, and a viewer object, so that a program can be written for example to open a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) or Microsoft Document Imaging Format (MDI) document, change the zoom scale, compression options, and OCR text information.