Hello everyone,
This might be a difficult question to answer but I am trying my luck. Does anyone know of a good OCR sofware for the Japanese language? Please help out of you know?
Thank you,
ivo
PS. If you need a fuller explanation:
OCR helps you recognize text that was, for example, scanned from a book, your notes etc. Usually when you scan a text like that you are unable to edit it. But with a OCR software you can recognize this text and edit it later (Adobe PRO has an integrated OCR - optical character recognition - so does these days google.docs etc.). With English, there is no problem now to scan a text and then transfer it into word document, html etc. But is there any software that could do it for Japanese in a reliable way that you know of? I have found out that Omnipage and ABBVY Reader should be able to do it...but have never used this software in real life and before shelling out $500 I'd like to know how good it is.
Why do I need to do this: I am currently working on my dissertation that requires that I read a ton of Japanese scholarly literature but with my level of Japanese I am still unable to read fast (need constantly to look kanji that I don't know). Since this takes obviously a lot of time (time I don't have, unfortunately) I thought it would be much easier if I scanned the books, then transfered the text into HTML and then used Rikaichan while reading. This will be still time consuming but not as much as what I am doing now.
Any ideas or help will be truly appreciated.
