Microsoft Office Document Imaging

Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) is a discontinued Microsoft Office application that supports editing documents scanned by Microsoft Office Document Scanning. It was first introduced in Microsoft Office XP and is included in later Office versions including Office 2007. It is no longer available in Office 2010, although it is possible to install MODI from a previous version of Microsoft Office along with Office 2010. MODI allows users to Scan documents, recognize images using OCR, view a scanned document and Annotate scanned documents including using ink on a Tablet PC.

While the native file format of MODI seems to be MDI, MODI can read and write a small variety of TIFF files. It can also save OCR text into the original TIFF file. However, MODI produces .tif files which violate the TIFF standard and are usable only by the Microsoft Office Document Imaging products. JPEG format images can be recovered from these files using data carving recovery tools designed to cull intact files from images of damaged hard drives such as Foremost. The OCR text in these files is visible in a binary editor.

In its default mode, the OCR engine will de-skew and re-orient the page where required. If the objectname.save() method is called it will save the deskewed reoriented images back into the original image file.

Programmability

Via COM, MODI provides an object model based on 'document' and 'image' (page) objects. One feature that has elicited particular interest on the Web is MODI's ability to convert scanned images to text under program control, using its built-in OCR engine.

The MODI object model is accessible from development tools that support the Component Object Model (COM) by using a reference to the Microsoft Office Document Imaging 11.0 Type Library. The MODI Viewer control is accessible from any development tool that supports ActiveX controls by adding Microsoft Office Document Imaging Viewer Control 11.0 or 12.0 (MDIVWCTL.DLL) to the application project. These folders are usually located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MODI.

The MODI control became accessible in the Office 2003 release; while the associated programs were included in earlier Office XP, the object model was not exposed to programmatic control.

A simple example in Visual Basic .NET follows:

Dim inputFile As String = "C:\test\multipage.tif"
Dim strRecText As String = ""
Dim Doc1 As MODI.Document
 
Doc1 = New MODI.Document
Doc1.Create(inputFile)
Doc1.OCR()  ' this will ocr all pages of a multi-page tiff file
Doc1.Save() ' this will save the deskewed reoriented images, and the OCR text, back to the inputFile
 
For imageCounter As Integer = 0 To (Doc1.Images.Count - 1) ' work your way through each page of results
    strRecText &= Doc1.Images(imageCounter).Layout.Text    ' this puts the ocr results into a string
Next
 
File.AppendAllText("C:\test\testmodi.txt", strRecText)     ' write the OCR file out to disk
 
Doc1.Close() ' clean up
Doc1 = Nothing

Changes since Office 2003 Service Pack 3

In Office 2003 Service Pack 3, Microsoft removed the file association for .TIF and .TIFF file extensions with Microsoft Office Document Imaging as part of the Service Pack's security changes. Also, TIFF files can no longer use JPEG compression. No detail is given about what the security issue was.

In Office 2010, MODI is fully deprecated. This change also affects the setup tree, which no longer shows the MODI Help, OCR, or Indexing Service Filter nodes on the Tools menu. The Internet Fax feature in Office 2010 uses the Windows Fax printer driver to generate a fixed file format (TIF). MODI and all its components are deprecated for 64-bit Office 2010.

See also

• Microsoft Document Imaging Format

Further reading

• "An .mdi file does not open in the Microsoft Office Document Imaging program that is included in the 2007 Office programs (Revision 4.0)". Microsoft Support. Microsoft. 12 September 2011. Retrieved 13 December 2012. 
• "Microsoft Office Document Imaging Visual Basic Reference (MODI)". Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft. 9 December 2003. Retrieved 13 December 2012. 
• "Using the Microsoft Office Document Imaging 2003 Object Model". MSDN. Microsoft. Retrieved 13 December 2012.