count_zero Posted April 1, 2006 at 09:21 AM Report Share Posted April 1, 2006 at 09:21 AM If you use a scanner on a page of text there is often software that comes bundled with the scanner which can, rather cleverly, recognise the writing and convert it into ASCII or whatever -text basically. So. Imagine you photograph some Chinese writing. Is there a piece of software that can convert that jpeg into text to put into a word file. It would be a pretty impressive function but entirely possible, I'm sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onebir Posted April 1, 2006 at 12:16 PM Report Share Posted April 1, 2006 at 12:16 PM There's chinese OCR software here. Not sure how it would fare with a jpeg from a photograph though. They do have a little portable pen scanner ("SuperScanEye"), but it's quite expensive ($240). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chenpv Posted April 1, 2006 at 05:30 PM Report Share Posted April 1, 2006 at 05:30 PM Try Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.07 (not reader.), which is downloadable online. Around 400 mb after complete installation. I dont know if there is Chinese simplied edition available, since I am using an English version which transforms pics with English to texts pretty smoothly. Hope it helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
889 Posted April 2, 2006 at 07:30 AM Report Share Posted April 2, 2006 at 07:30 AM Simply convert the .jpeg to a line art (black and white) .tiff using a photo editor. Iview is a free editor that will do this. Then input the .tiff to your OCR program just like scanner output. Make sure you've got even lighting when you photograph the pages. Otherwise light shadows will become dark smudges when you convert to .tiffs Of course you'll need a camera with a decent lens. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lugubert Posted April 2, 2006 at 08:34 PM Report Share Posted April 2, 2006 at 08:34 PM Two weeks ago, suddenly nothing worked. I used to scan and OCR read the Chinese texts for next week's lesson, sometimes getting almost perfect results, but suddenly no scanner-computer combination worked (I've got three each). Weird. Growing desperate, and not having time enough to re-install all software and updates and whatever, I took a quick photo of the text. It didn't look very good on screen, more like gray and gray than black and white. But the OCR SW did it! I won't tell you the brand, because I haven't got their not too cheap pen to work for more than a few minutes at a time during a couple of years, and the "new OCR SW version, with improved language recognition" (not exactly free either) by design didn't manage Chinese at all! ETA: I used the plain camera jpg. No manipulation or conversion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
count_zero Posted April 2, 2006 at 11:50 PM Author Report Share Posted April 2, 2006 at 11:50 PM OK that sounds encouraging. Are there any free OCR programs that you can recommend? I don't want to buy before I try and I have very slow download so I rely on recommendations from time-honoured posters such as yourselves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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