Microsoft Office Document Imaging

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Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) is a 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 2003 and Office 2007. According to Microsoft, MODI allows users to:

• Scan single or multi-page documents.
• Produce editable text from a scanned document using OCR.
• Copy and export scanned text and images to Microsoft Word.
• View a scanned document (the software does not permit navigating among multiple documents).
• Search for text within scanned documents.
• Easily reorganize scanned document pages.
• Send scanned documents via e-mail or Internet fax.
• 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, although the text appears to be accessible only through the Microsoft Office Document Imaging products. The text is visible in a binary editor.

In its default mode, the OCR engine will deskew 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.

The quality of the OCR is very good compared to .NET components available for a price similar to the Office suite.

[edit] 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

[edit] External links

• About Microsoft Office Document Imaging Microsoft MODI overview.
• Office - Document Imaging Microsoft online help for MODI users.
• [1] - Information on how to install Microsoft Office Document Imaging in Office 2007, as it is not installed automatically.
• Office 2003: Microsoft Office Document Imaging Visual Basic Reference (MODI)
• Using the Microsoft Office Document Imaging 2003 Object Model - Microsoft reference for programmers.
• "Document Processing Part I: OCR with Microsoft Office" - Article on The Code Project on using MODI to do OCR from C#.

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