C-E dictionary software that can do on-screen OCR?

[MaPLe]

I'm looking for a Chinese-English dictionary software that can do on-screen OCR, i.e. show the English definition and maybe the pinyin transcription of Chinese characters/words anywhere on the screen by just putting the mouse pointer over them. I already have Wenlin, but it doesn't do OCR--it requires that text be pasted into it. And I have tried Babylon (not Chinese-specific), but it requires that you click on every character you want to look up. I want something that, once activated, will automatically look up the character that's currently under the mouse pointer as the pointer is moved. This would be extremely handy when reading Web sites.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[benotnobody]

I don't think OCR is really the right term. Optical Character Recognition refers to a technology that can convert an image (eg scanned) to editable text.

[pazu]

Then try the NJSTAR CHinese WP (http://www.njstar.com/download), you can paste (okay, still "paste") the whole article into their WP, then you can get the meaning either by pointing your mouse over (without clicking), or choose "word annotation" from the "Tools" Menu.

In any cases, this program is one of the best programs for anyone who's learning Chinese.

[nnt]

I think Powerword dictionary 金山词霸 from www.kingsoft.com does "mouse-over cursor translation" (your "OCR")

[MaPLe]

pazu & nnt: Thanks a lot for your help. I had already checked those out before, but a friend just suggested a program that better suits my needs: DrEye.

benotnobody: These programs indeed perform OCR on partial captures of the screen (the area around the mouse pointer).

Thanks again!

[Claw]

benotnobody: These programs indeed perform OCR on partial captures of the screen (the area around the mouse pointer).

That's not actually OCR because the program is able to retrieve what text your mouse is pointing to by asking the computer. In real OCR, you would have a scanned image. To the computer, it's not text, just a picture, and normally it can't tell the difference between the two.

What OCR software does is to attempt to read the picture and convert the pictoral representation of the text into actual text that the computer can use (and many times it's not that reliable, especially if the text is in a non-standard font).

[MaPLe]

That's not actually OCR because the program is able to retrieve what text your mouse is pointing to by asking the computer. In real OCR, you would have a scanned image. To the computer, it's not text, just a picture, and normally it can't tell the difference between the two.

I don't know about Dr.eye because I haven't yet purchased it, but Babylon does do OCR. At least with English text (haven't tried Chinese).

What OCR software does is to attempt to read the picture and convert the pictoral representation of the text into actual text that the computer can use (and many times it's not that reliable, especially if the text is in a non-standard font).

I know. And that's exactly the case with Babylon.

[roseha]

When I worked in Taiwan all my chinese coworkers used Dr.Eye to read english documentation and websites. All you had to do was hover your mouse over the english word and a pop up would appear giving you the chinese definition. From what i remember dr.eye was also able to covert entire word docs from traditional chinese to simplified and vise versa.

I haven't used Dr.Eye in ages and would like to purchase it (to improve my chinese) but I'm curious to know if it converts chinese to english as well as it did from english to chinese.

Theres also a Dr.Eye for Palm if you're interested.

[smalltownfart]

That's not actually OCR because the program is able to retrieve what text your mouse is pointing to by asking the computer. In real OCR, you would have a scanned image. To the computer, it's not text, just a picture, and normally it can't tell the difference between the two.

I don't know about Dr.eye because I haven't yet purchased it, but Babylon does do OCR. At least with English text (haven't tried Chinese).

I think you are missing his point. That is *not* OCR. You are just getting the text

under the cursor picked up for your translation software. This is still *text* and not

from an image or pictorial representation ( ie cuadro in Spanish? )

If you are not convinced, here is a simple test you can do:

Go to

http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&q=bible%20text&sa=N&tab=wi

With your Kingsoft or DrEye or Firefox CJK translator software running, move

your mouse cursor over any of the bible passages in any of the images.

What do you see? Absolutely nada, right?

If you can get the translations to work over text *inside the images*, then that would be OCR.

If someone can figure out how to do it, then that would be most impressive!

Otherwise, that is not _OCR_ as it is defined.

Please also feel free to look this up in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

[AppleJacks]

Granted it only works for documents viewed within your browser, it sounds like that is what you're interested in. Go to the Extensions section of the Tools menu in Firefox (sorry, I don't typically use IE), click on Get More Extensions, and then under Languages look for Hanzibar. Gives you a dictionary lookup for the character, with Pinyin.

Sorry, no OCR it only works with text characters that are properly encoded.

I have only used it for a short time, but it is OK. For large text I would use the copy/paste method.

[holger]

Does anyone know a tool that provides real ocr functionality and translation for single (chinese) characters or words with mouse over activation? Programs like read-iris do that very well but you first have to import a graphic file wich takes some time.

I have to read through a great number of chinese pdf documents. Most of them are not character encoded but simple scanned graphics. It would be great to have a tool like for example the lingoes translator that recognizes any graphical representation of chinese characters when mouse-over or maybe draw a rectangle around the area before recognizing.

Bye!

[Luobot]

Are you looking for something like this tool, called COCR2.

COCR2 is a small experimental (and free) Chinese OCR. It recognizes more than 10000 characters (traditional or simplified) and accepts 3 different fonts : Song, Kay and Hei or similar. The recognition rate reaches 99% and even more for good quality scanned texts. COCR2 is still experimental. It has not been designed to replace commercial applications. Its major limitation comes from the fact that it doesn’t perform any text segmentation. So the user has to select himself or herself the characters to be ocrized with the mouse cursor. However it remains quite useful to process small texts.

[ABCinChina]

I know that others will recommend StarDict which is completely free. The only bad thing about it is that there are so many user-contributed dictionaries to choose from and they have some mistakes in them.

[blogtim]

We recommend Loqu8 iCE. Disclosure: I wrote it!

Respectfully,

Tim