I am searching for information on OCR software and apparently my question is too obvious to find an answer. I have a MFC device that will scan documents into my Mac at which time it asks if I want to convert it to OCR. I don't have OCR software so I am looking for some. That is great but my document is a technical book with drawings of engineered parts, tables ans graphs. My question is does OCR software preserve these images in the saved file or are they lost, damaged or destroyed? I just want to be able to scan the document so I can change or update text without changing the images. Any help?

OCR software converts images into ASCII characters; in your case, the letters in the words. That won't help, IMHO.

However, if all you want to do is change verbiage and not the drawings or dimensions themselves, then a program like Photoshop should allow you to do that on the native scanned material. Delete the old and insert the new.

There are apps that'll convert bit-mapped to vector, but they're pricey: http://vectormagic.com/home

I am still confused. Say I have a page that includes a drawing of a valve inside a border. I understand the words on the page are coverted. But does the valve get destroyed? Is there a way to just skip it? I have hundreds of such illustrations and recreating or cut and paste is just not feasible.

I did not look but would expect Adobe to do this if not I did a quick search and found this:

The 3-Heights™ OCR Enterprise Add-On is an OCR module, which is used as an option
with several 3-Heights™ products. Based on the ABBYY FineReader Engine it
recognizes text contents and embeds these as Unicode Text in the PDF- and PDF/AFile. This makes the PDF files full-text searchable. Numerous options in image
manipulation, image pre-processing and text recognition allow a recognition process
ideally coordinated to your needs. Almost 200 languages are supported; almost 50
languages are supported by dictionaries and morphologic tools.
Features
Recognition of machine generated texts
Recognition of typewriter scripts and barcodes (1D)
Image manipulation
Image pre-processing

As you can see it does images... which your drawings should wind up as after scanning.

At worst scan the drawings save as jpg, scan the doc, do the ocr, place the jpg's into the document.

Or you can use comments or notes on the scanned doc to make minor changes.

quote:

Originally posted by Tom K:
I am still confused. Say I have a page that includes a drawing of a valve inside a border. I understand the words on the page are coverted. But does the valve get destroyed? Is there a way to just skip it? I have hundreds of such illustrations and recreating or cut and paste is just not feasible.

It would depend on the program, but the usual OCR app only converts characters it recognizes and leaves all else untouched.