Pen scanners for Chinese characters?

[mtaplits]

Hi all! I often have the need to figure out what a written Chinese character in a printed email is. I'm looking at a way to scan the character in and use OCR to then put it into a character to pinyin software.

I'm looking at things such as this:

http://www.hotcardtech.com/eng/products_pc_smartpen.htm

Does anyone have any familiarity with these types of products? Do they work?

Thanks!

Regards,

Marshall

[mandarinboy]

Yes they do. Rather nice actualy. On the other hand, if you have the original e-mail there are several free resources on the net that let you do that directly on the screen.

I have found it very handy to use those devices when reading newspapers, books etc. Faster than looking up characters in a paper dictionary. Some of them also lets you store the looked up words so that you can learn them. Some of them comes with different dictionaries so that you can use them for other languages as well. Handy for us non native English speakers:oops:

I use a Chinese pen but i have forgotten the name of it (i am curently not in China where my pen is). It comes with a display so i can use it whitout my computer. That is for me very important. Other important feature is the capability to scan handwritten characters.

[Lugubert]

My IRISPen executive (Asian version) is supposed to read Chinese. I haven't been able to talk it into performing. I haven't spent much time on it, because when I want OCR, it's mostly larger chunks, so I use a page scanner. The IRIS Pro 7 + Asian add-on works very well most of the time for a variety of fonts. There are several more recent versions, but I'm not familiar with them. If you go for their current offers, do check that Chinese is supported. "More languages than previous version" has meant that CJK wasn't supported for a while.