Text Searchable tiff images

If you have Office XP and Office 2003 you can create Text Searchable Tiff images for Free. Microsoft's Document Imaging is a component of Microsoft's Office XP Suite that allows for the creation of Text Searchable Tiff images. Although it is included with Office XP and Office 2003 it does not automatically install as part of the basic installation. This is an important feature that many people are not aware of and it can be used with a copier that has a scan option.

Text Searchable Tiff images are just what the name implies (an image that is searchable) and they work seamlessly with the search engine that comes with Windows XP. This allows a user to search for a word in a scanned image, once the image file is found the user can use the find feature just like they do in other Microsoft Applications to go directly to the page that contains the word. Text Searchable Tiffs are very similar to text searchable PDF files in that you can search for words in a document, copy and paste the text into different applications and always view the image of the document.

These text searchable images are only created by Microsoft Office Document Imaging which utilizes the OCR engine from Nuance (Owners of OMNI Page - formally ScanSoft). Without question this OCR engine is one of the five best in the World, and is available in different languages. If English is not the language to be used Text Searchable Tiffs setup will prompt the user for the location of MODI.

The search engine in Windows XP will automatically OCR a tiff image allowing the user to find a document based on words in the document; however, this process is done every time a search is performed. This can take hours or even days based on the volume of documents that have to be OCR'd. Once the document is found it has to be OCR'd again in order to use the find feature. If the file was created as a Text Searchable Tiff image to begin with the search engine does not OCR it again; it uses the text that is contained in the file allowing for quicker retrieval and the document itself to be searched.

Although Text Searchable Tiffs can be searched for with the search engine built into Windows, if more search options are desired or if retrieval speed is critical eDocfile recommends dtSearch. It will search for not only the Text Searchable Tiffs but also, most all other document types including PDF's, Outlook Mail, Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets etc. It allows the user to refine the search by Proximity “words within so many words of another”, Stemming (the root of the search word), Synonym (related words) Phonic (sound like) and Fuzzy Searching (some of the letters match). It can also limit the search by index data in the Author, Subject, Title and Keywords in a files properties. It does the searching almost instantaneous, unlike the search engine in Windows. Visit dtsearch website

Text searchable Tiff images have to be created in one of two ways. The document has to be brought into the PC using Microsoft's Document Scanning utility. This utility will scan the document into the PC and automatically create the text searchable file. Since it uses a TWAIN driver it is compatible with many copier's TWAIN scanning option. However, it has no batch scanning capability or batch processing capability. Therefore, you cannot just push images to a file folder and have them automatically converted into Text Searchable Tiff images. The other way to create a text searchable tiff image is to open it in Microsoft's Document Imaging run the OCR option run and save the file.

Text Searchable Tiffs

eDocFile has created Text Searchable Tiffs a utility that will batch process existing images into text searchable tiff images. This allows for quicker searches and for the image files themselves to be text searchable. The user selects the folder(s) to be processed and starts the program - that's it. Everything happens in the background and there is no need for further operator intervention. Since performing OCR is processor intensive the utility can be set to run after hours using Microsoft's Scheduler.

This utility will OCR all the images in each folder specified in the Setup Utility. This utility is available for $99.00 and a Site License is available for $499.00 (the site license allows for unlimited installations at a given physical location).

Online Manual

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Menu to create text searchable Tiff images

"Note: Pricing is non-concurrent. A 5-user purchase means a license for 5 seats. Pricing also works as volume licensing. For example, a 100-user purchase could be for 100 laptops."