I have scanned a number of documents in .tif (imaging) format. Are there any
programs that would  allow me to search the content inside each of
these documents?

For future reference, would you recommend that I scan documents as pdf
files instead.

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Request for Question Clarification by rainbow-ga on 09 Jan 2006 00:37 PST

Does this help?

How do I search text in a TIFF file?

"Select Open Text from the menu (the document opens in a Notepad
menu). Select Search from the Notepad menu bar then Find. Enter your
search word at the Find What box and click on Find Next to begin the
search."

Best regards,
Rainbow

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Clarification of Question by cambridge1-ga on 09 Jan 2006 17:02 PST

Dear Rainbow,

Thank you for looking into my question.

I am looking for a program that would enable me to search across all
of my tif documents simultaneously, rather than opening an individual
tif document and searching inside it (as your suggestion seems to
reflct).

TIFF files are stored image files and as such are not directly
searchable for text keywords. You would need to convert the file to a
text file using Optical Character recognition (OCR) software (many
scanners come with this software included in the bundle).

Scanning documents directly to pdf format is the simplest approach to
creating searchable digital documents.

For a good description of the pros & cons of pdf vs tiff see:

http://www.docsci.com/What%20to%20do%20with%20all%20those%20documents.pdf

This information was found using a google search with the following keywords:

"tiff vs pdf" searchable

The document appears on the www.docsci.com site which was the nineth
url on the first search page returned by google.

Although you can add text to an image file and make it searchable
while saving it in .tiff format (see:
http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,44281,pg,3,00.asp) I aggree
with appnetguru that an incoming fax is going to have to be OCRed 
before becoming searchable.

Good Luck

Scanning to tif format is not going to give you the results you
desire. As stated above, a good solution to your needs would be to
scan your docs into pdf format using OCR.  The current Adobe Acrobat
7.0 does a good job of this.  The name of a good the search program to
use is X1.  You can find information about it on their web page at 
www.X1.com.  The desktop edition seems to satisfy most all of your
search needs.  With a good, high capacity scanner, you can scan
thousands of docs and be able to search across all of them quickly.  I
know someone using this solution with excellent success. Good luck