Trouble reading tough kanji in manga/VNs? OCR to the rescue!

Japanese Language Resources
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Hi everyone. I made an OCR tool that allows you to easily paste screenshots into it. You can use something like Lightshot to ctrl + c an image and ctrl + v to paste it in. Once you upload an image, you can keep pasting new ones with ctrl + v!

Try it out here. I haven’t written any instructions on the website yet, but I wanted to get some feedback! I will be adding more features, like translations in the next few days. I’ll keep the translations blurred by default. I also want to make it so you can click a button to copy the text/translation should you use it to import into anki.

Some notes:

  • Supports any language
  • Smaller images are faster to scan (for example, don’t upload the whole manga page, but only the dialogue parts)
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I tested it out a bit, and I’m impressed! You really seem to know what you’re doing!

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For manga I can understand, but is there any reason to use this over a text hooker for a VN?

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I think for VNs text hookers might be more useful, but this tool would be good for other types of media-- including subtitles on Youtube videos (the ones not provided by google), pdfs, etc.

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Thank you!

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Probably also good for the BookWalker client’s atrocious in-app tools.

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I agree. I have been using it on BookWalker and it works great! That being said, sometimes manga with furigana confuse the OCR tool.

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I have updated the tool to have translations. They’re blurred by default but you can unblur them by clicking on them.

Let me know what other features you would like to see and if you would actually use this tool.

Thanks!

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Oh, cool. You guys are the same people from that super useful and aesthetic IG page.

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Yes! I’m surprised you know about us :). If you have any content/topic requests for IG let me know!

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Very interesting! I’ll be using this in the future! Thank you for this

I had a bit of fun trying to catch it out :rofl:

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Haha. I noticed that it doesn’t do so well on handwritten/non-standard fonts. We should make a new thread for funny OCR errors!

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Just tried it with a BookWalker page and it works great

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I did have to crop out some text at the top. It handles vertical and horizontal text just fine it’s just harder for me to read when they’re together. :joy:

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Should I make them farther apart? I also felt this might be the case but wasn’t sure how to fix it. Let me know your thoughts!

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Yeah that would probably help since the horizontal text in mixed media is usually explanatory, but I think it’s fine as it is too.

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I also tried with Booklive (which is basically the same as bookwalker), and it’s doing great, except with furigana, which it tries to force in the text anyway.
Maybe you could detect smaller text and ignore it?
Edit: ah, I found one error in the sample I picked, but it’s a hard kanji, so good job anyway.
Edit edit: I just finished checking, and there were a couple more mistakes, always on complex kanji.

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I love this tool! Usually Acrobat has been working well for me but the manga I’m reading it is missing about 75%. I tried some tools at the app store that produced garbage. This tool has been a life saver.

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