Trying to learn and make sense of Chinese text? Need to copy Chinese text from images or scanned PDF file?
Chinese writing is totally different from the western alphabet. It is written with distinctive characters which has no relation to the sound of the word.
A good Chinese OCR software can help you overcome this challenge. Here, we’ve tried most of the Chinese OCR Apps on the market, we list the top 8 software (both free and paid options) for you. Take a look at the list and use this to find the best Chinese OCR for your specific needs.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR
Free Download macOS 10.14 or later 
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
Chinese is a complex language and differs from western languages in several aspects. If an OCR software has not trained for this language and tries to map the western alphabet with Chinese characters, the OCR result will look like garbled up nonsense.
Different scripts - English has only 26 letters, but in Chinese, there are more than 1,000 commonly used letters, and more than 3,000 are basically available.
Complex structure - In addition to the large number of Chinese characters, The Chinese structure is complex. For example, there are many highly similar Chinese characters like “兔" and “免”, which are only slightly different. These all bring difficulties to Chinese OCR.
Traditional vs. Simplified Chinese - Also, there are two different written forms of Chinese: Traditional and Simplified. Often, Simplified Chinese characters have fewer strokes than their traditional counterparts, which means that OCR engines need to be trained specifically for this two varies.
Even with all these complications, There are still some good Chinese OCR software that can recognize Chinese text with high accuracy.
To recognize Chinese characters from image/scanned PDF accurately, including simplified and traditional Chinese, the best solution is using a professional Chinese OCR program, which can guarantee a high quality OCR result and offer extended features to give a wonderful experience on doing Chinese OCR.
Basing on the benchmarks of simplicity, OCR accuracy, output format support and batch support, we picked the best for you. Cisdem PDF OCR Converter OCR, is the best PDF Converter for Mac and Windows users, enabling users to convert native, scanned PDF and images into 15+ formats, including PDF to Word, Excel, PPTX, ePub, Text, HTML, etc.
Cisdem can recognize 50+ languages like Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc. It can be used easily for Chinese OCR.
It can recognize Chinese text from any type of Chinese files, including images, invoices, receipts, business cards, etc. You can easily digitize and extract the Chinese text using Cisdem PDF Converter OCR.
Till now, most OCR software, especially free online OCR site have trouble dealing with this ‘non-standard’ type face. With Cisdem PDF Converter OCR you can expect Chinese OCR accuracy of 99%, which is higher than most OCR tools on the market.
It supports recognize Chinese from both scanned PDF and Images to text with the intelligent OCR feature, the steps will be a bit different and here we list the steps as following.
Free Download macOS 10.14 or later Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 
Notes: To OCR protected Chinese files, click on the lock icon to enter correct password or use PDF Password Remover to remove forgotten password.
Though you are recommended to do Chinese OCR with professional Chinese OCR software for the sake of high accuracy and security, if you are working on simple Chinese files and don’t do this very often, you can still utilize free ways to do Chinese character recognition online.
As we know, Google offers various online services to boost productivity for us. Among those free services, there is an online platform to manage documents called Google Drive. It builds in a program Google Docs, allowing users to open, convert and perform OCR on Google supported files. That’s to say, you can perform Chinese OCR in both PDF and image with Google Docs for free online.
Another online free OCR program to do Chinese OCR is Convertio. It is more like a OCR converter to recognize image-based files and then export as editable formats. It does a great job to support various input and output formats. Though not able to recognize as many languages as Google Chinese OCR, it supports to recognize all the popular languages.
Although online Chinese character recognition tools provide a lot of convenience for everyone, they are still no match for desktop software in terms of stability, functionality and security. Keep reading to learn the best free Chinese OCR software offline.
We find another free Chinese OCR software on desktop for Mac and Windows users - PDF OCR X Community Edition, a simple-to-use and lightweight OCR tool to convert scanned PDF and image to searchable PDF or plain text. Plus, 60+ languages can be recognized by this free program.
Users who need to process multi-page PDF require more robust OCR app, here is another solution. Microsoft OneNote is known as a note-taking software, but few users know that it comes with an intelligent OCR that supports extracting text from Chinese PDF files, images, even handwriting quickly.
Scan &Translate is a highly rated iOS program to do Chinese OCR, also allows user to translate the texts from Chinese files to English and other 90 languages.
Main Features of Scan & Translate
Text Fairy is a highly recommended Chinese OCR app for Android users, it receives good reputation from its users on Google Play, but it supports OCR Chinese and other languages only, it won't translate for you.
Main Features of Text Scanner
Now, we’ve looked at the top 8 Chinese OCR software in the market.
All the software has its own specific use cases and merits. If you only need to do Chinese OCR for one time you can use free online OCR tools or Google Chinese OCR, If you have large demand on Chinese or Asian OCR, you can use Cisdem PDF Converter OCR that can recognize with high accuracy and process files in batch.
Here, we have list our recommended best Chinese OCR Software in the market:
Carolyn has always been passionate about reading and writing, so she joined Cisdem as an editor as soon as she graduated from university. She focuses on writing how-to articles about PDF editing and conversion.
Joe Black
I am now studying Chinese, sometime I use Wechat to do the OCR, but yours seems to be much professional.