Word Doc to Tif

I'm wanting to develop a routine to create a tif of a Word doc. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your replies...

Word doc to tif? I may be wrong but isn't a tif a picture format, whereas doc is microsoft word's file extension? Are you trying to extract the picture form the document via code or something? Sorry if I misunderstood you.

I'm wanting to create an image file (tif) of the word document (doc). Sorry I wasn't very clear

essentially I want to bypass the printing and scanning steps of a document. one the document is created I want to create an image of the created document.

Ok so you want code for this or do you have a word document made that contains a picture and you want to get that picture out. If you don't understand me let me clarify something. As far as I know, word documents aren't, and will never be able to be converted to, image files. If you have a document with an image file inside of it you can simply right click on it, copy it and paste it into a program like Photoshop (or whatever you use) and save it as a tif file (you can't save as tif in paint although you could paste it there). If however you are planning to make a program that opens a word document which contains an image and want to extract it via code than thats another question.

Ok let me explain the entire situation. when we process a contract it opens 14 word documents for printing that pull information from a merge file that is created at the time of printing. I want to be able to reprint these documents as they existed at the original time of printing. Which means that the documents must contain the same information that was extracted from the merge document without using a merge document again. This will ensure that data that may have changed in the database does not effect the original document.

One solution was to scan the documents as tifs once they have been printed. I was hoping to skip that step and just create a tif (kind of like a screen shot) of the word document while it was open on screen.

Thanks again

OK, I think I get it you want something like a screen shot but only of what's inside the word document. hmmm... I can't help you on that one as far as I know. Sorry about that, I hope someone else can help out though. I'd be interested to see if it's possible...

Thanks for the responses.

Do you specifically want to do this in .Net (as opposed to VBA for example)? Why?

Can't you just save the word documents as word documents, and not update the merge fields when you reopen them? (I'm not a Word expert so maybe that's not possible, but I think it should be.)

If not, pdf would be much easier than tif. There are various 3rd party components available for converting doc to pdf. I haven't heard of any that convert to tif.

No it doesn't have to been in .Net. The reason for trying to go to a tiff format is so that when this are reopened at a later time you can add annotations to the image that can be ignored when printing but show when viewing.

If this isn't possible, which in my experience nothing is impossible but simply a factor of time and money, then I would want to save them as word docs that cannot be edited and would not update with their merge files thereby preserving the originals. I'm not sure on how to do that either.

As far as pdfs go, that is a possiblility too. but how would I do that programmatically so that when the word doc is created it would be saved as pdf as well?

I realize my response comes 2 weeks later than the others, but, you can use plugins to do this, basically print them as PDF's instead.

Here is the problem with Tif's.

Most people out there do not have a good Tif viewer, but everyone in the world has a PDF reader.

Simply purchasing Adobe PDF Writer and installing it on the PC that you want to export the documents from, and print to PDF would do the trick.

If it really must be a tiff, you can google up tiff printer drivers, but I seriously would not suggest it.

Once it is a PDF, you can use the Adobe API to then convert it to a tiff.

If you have a copy of Office 2003 or i think Office xp has it to. You can install the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer that will print directly to tiff. You can do this in code by doing it the same way you print a document and then making the default printer the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer and it will ask you to save the image as a tiff. I think you can get this from the Office web site as well? Hope this helps.