XiaoXi Posted September 23, 2011 at 12:21 PM Report Share Posted September 23, 2011 at 12:21 PM Why doesn't this exist? I particularly want this for iPad. Does anyone know if there is and eBook PDF reader that can lookup Chinese words? Like the document reader in Pleco except that one can only instant lookup words in plain text files. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikelove Posted September 23, 2011 at 12:26 PM Report Share Posted September 23, 2011 at 12:26 PM We're actually working on this functionality for Pleco, but it's very tricky because you basically need to do it by OCRing an image of the page - there's no neat, consistent way to simply extract the text from a particular location in a PDF file. You can do it in some files using the open-source Calibre (or another app like it), but especially for Chinese that tends to be highly unreliable. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbradfor Posted September 23, 2011 at 04:23 PM Report Share Posted September 23, 2011 at 04:23 PM instant lookup words in plain text files. As Mike Love indicated, the problem is that pdf is NOT a "plain text" file. What you can try doing is when you get a pdf, convert it to a plain text file; if the file is just mostly text, it should convert well. [if it's complicated, or been done weird, you won't get good results.] In the linux world, for example, "pdftotext" works well (or pdf2txt). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XiaoXi Posted September 24, 2011 at 04:36 AM Author Report Share Posted September 24, 2011 at 04:36 AM Yes I can PDF to text but for some books its really nice and convenient to retain the graphical elements and images in with the text. Especially when its reading in a foreign language and not your native tongue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XiaoXi Posted September 24, 2011 at 11:32 AM Author Report Share Posted September 24, 2011 at 11:32 AM Anyway Pleco has OCR of anything through the inbuilt camera - surely its easier to OCR a digital PDF than it is to OCR a moving object through the camera! It would also open up to the world of comics in Chinese! To be honest, the first person to make a good PDF/comic/ebook reader with Chinese dictionary lookup for the iPad is gonna be laughing. Hmm maybe I should just get it developed myself and be that person... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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