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I have an optical scanner. Can I use Wenlin to read scanned Chinese text?

April 26, 2017Chinese optical read scanned scanner text Wenlin

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I have an optical scanner. Can I use Wenlin to read scanned Chinese text?

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A scanned text is a picture — a graphics file. To convert it into electronic text, you need Chinese OCR (optical character recognition) software. That’s not included with Wenlin. There are links to some websites that advertise OCR software here. However, be aware that even the best OCR software won’t recognize all the Chinese text you scan. If it’s 95% accurate, that means one out of twenty characters might be missing or wrong. You have to decide whether it’s worth the trouble. In addition to the texts on the Wenlin CD-ROM, there are thousands of Chinese texts already in electronic form that you can find on the internet and read using Wenlin. For most students, it probably makes more sense to use those existing texts rather than try to use OCR.