What Is a Mdi File?
The MDI file format is an advanced image storage format. Don't confuse it with MIDI, which is an audio storage format. MDI is relatively new compared with other file formats for storing images.
Other People Are Reading
-
The Facts
-
The Microsoft Document Imaging (MDI) format was released along with Microsoft's Office 2003 programs. It is proprietary to Microsoft, who developed it as a means of storing and manipulating raster images with its Office Document Imaging application. The format is designed to store images by page layout, and it is also capable of storing text recognized by optical character recognition.
-
Format
-
Microsoft's MDI file format is an extension of the widely used TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) that was introduced in the 1980s. An MDI file is smaller than a TIFF file for the same stored image. TIFF files are generally very big, and reducing file size was one of the primary reasons Microsoft developed the new format to complement its scanning application. In addition, MDI is able to store a higher-quality image than TIFF.
Applications
-
The MDI format is intended for use in scanning documents and optical character recognition, which allows a scanned document to be converted to editable text. Microsoft's scanning and OCR program, Office Document Imaging, uses MDI as its primary storage format, and it is able to store MDI files with the following color settings: monochrome, 1 bit per pixel; grayscale, 8 bits per pixel; and color, 24 bits RGB.
Compatibility
-
The Office Document Imaging application can save MDI files in the TIFF format for wider compatibility with other graphics or scanning programs. Some third-party MDI file viewers are available. Microsoft has not officially released information about the inner workings of the format, so creating, editing and saving MDI files are still the exclusive domain of Microsoft Office Document Imaging.
Downsides to MDI
-
Because the MDI format is proprietary to Microsoft, it is not as widely used as the TIFF format.
With their smaller size, MDI files are ideal for transferring high-quality images between computers. But because the format is proprietary, many users shy away from it. Without the Office Document Imaging application, the MDI format is of little use. MDI can always be converted to TIFF -- but then the file-size advantage is lost.
-
References
- Photo Credit "dscf6822" is Copyrighted by Flickr user: hr.icio (tomasz przechlewski) under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
