Need simple word lookup device for paperback reading

[sohikeh]

Hi, does anyone have experience with a high quality device they use to quickly look up words when reading a Chinese paper-based (like chinese pera pera but for paper-based mediums, not electronic or web-based), such as an OCR scanner of some kind. If you've been using a specific product/model and found it satisfactory, would really appreciate to know which one! Thanks.

[DavyJonesLocker]

pleco and hand write the character, OCR are too fiddly in my view

[mungouk]

The paid-for OCR on the latest version of the Pleco app works really well IMHO.

 

 

[Pall]

Pleco by looking up characters by radicals and the number of strokes, it's easier to use than drawing characters. And it trains oneself to distingush parts of characters better and so to memorise them faster

[sohikeh]

Thanks a lot for the responses!  I had the pleco dictionary installed and for past uses, found for every live capture you need to use the focus button, which might be fine but lets see how convenient that works out for long term reading with frequent lookups. I have a feeling the quality of the camera on your phone is a critical factor, if the capture is sharp enough, you might be able to turn every page into a digital version readable on your PC which you can then read with the much faster perapera instant hover Chinese lookup. A new phone is overdue anyways so hope so.. will update accordingly~ Thanks again!

[roddy]

@mikelove may be able to comment on how important the hardware is for Pleco OCR.

[imron]

40 minutes ago, sohikeh said:

 I had the pleco dictionary installed and for past uses, found for every live capture you need to use the focus button, which might be fine but lets see how convenient that works out for long term reading with frequent lookups

Looking up characters by the handwriting or radical input will be better for your Chinese in the long run compared to using OCR

[roddy]

Yeah, it would actually be useful to know what your circumstances are - are you actually learning Chinese, or trying to make sense of certain Chinese materials for some particular purpose, or.... if you tell us, we can completely change everything you're doing for free!

[mikelove]

6 hours ago, roddy said:

@mikelove may be able to comment on how important the hardware is for Pleco OCR.

 

It hasn't been for a few years now - the autofocus behavior you experienced suggests that either you had a very old phone or the continuous autofocus option somehow got turned off (tap on the 'camera' icon in the top bar and make sure the 'AF' button is enabled).

 

However, it's about to start mattering again because of our experimental 'New OCR' system, which you can try out now via the "New OCR" option in Settings / OCR (and which will be the default system in our long-awaited 4.0 release); that adds a much more powerful motion detection algorithm which makes everything a lot smoother / nicer, but that motion detector actually uses considerably more computing power than the OCR algorithm itself does and so it works best on a phone with a fast CPU.

 

(we're also looking at developing our very own OCR algorithm at some point post-4.0, and I expect that will likewise consume more resources than the current system does, but that's still a few years off, and we may drop that plan entirely if Google follows Apple in incorporating an OCR library into their operating system [Apple's doesn't support Chinese yet but we know they must be working on it] and if that proves accurate enough that it makes more sense to use it for free rather than roll our own)

[Jan Finster]

You can also use the camera (OCR) function of the google translator app.