After installing Office 2003, you will find a list of printers in the Print dialog box, more "Microsoft Office Document Image Writer" printers, if this item is selected, you will get an extension MDI file.
This virtual printer is not very useful, and there are very few articles to introduce it. But the following describes a good Microsoft Office Document Image Writer virtual print feature application scenario:
(1) We can use Microsoft Office Document Image Writer to make browsers such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, Outlook Express Email ... Various files that can be printed, and print output is MDI. General format for archiving.
(2) The Microsoft Office Document imaging feature provided in Office 2003, which provides a programming interface. It can easily extract the text, pictures, etc. included in the MDI file, which can be convenient to different index modules. Formatted document establishs an index.
(3) Office 2003 provides an ActiveX control that can view the contents of the MDI file, we can place the control into our Windows Forms to view the contents of the MDI file.
In this way, a versatile document management system is easy to create.
Maybe you have an Adobe Acrobat family (note that you don't include Adobe Acrobat Reader), you will know that there is a virtual printer that can print PDF format (and Acrobat Reader can only read PDF) in your printer list ). Here, Microsoft Office Document Image Writer's role is approximately similar to the virtual printer of Adobe Acrobat.
With the general format of PDF, we can also implement the functions of the above MDI implementation. However, the advantage of MDI is obvious: Office 2003 is already a lot of customers who have purchased or planned to purchase, and to purchase Acrobat's licens, which costs, other costs.
(Of course, there is still a factor, most people believe that Microsoft's own compatibility is relatively better.)
