6 Best Chinese OCR App to Recognize Chinese Characters (Online Incl.)

Do you often go to restaurant for Chinese cuisine? Do you have any interest in learning Chinese or Chinese culture for personal or career purposes? If yes, you must be either in the situation to copy and paste Chinese in translator for better understanding, or extract some Chinese resources for study, etc. 

But if you are working on some scanned Chinese files in PDF or Image format, you will need to do Chinese OCR to recognize the Chinese characters from PDF or image first, in this case, a Chinese OCR App is required. Here we list 6 best Chinese OCR software for Mac, Windows or Android/iOS mobile phone.

Best Chinese OCR Software 2021

To recognize Chinese characters accurately, 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.

Benchmark of Best Chinese OCR Software

• Easy to use---OCR can never be easy, but a top Chinese OCR software should help to perform OCR easily to get the most complicated job done.
• Accurate---OCR can never be perfect, while Chinese OCR is a difficult task. We all know that Chinese characters are quite special and differ so much from those letters. To recognize all the characters with high accuracy, the OCR program should be powerful. 
• Support editable output---Most of the times, we need to export the Chinese image files as editable Text, well-formatted Word, or searchable PDF, even other formats, so we can save our time and efforts to make full use of these Chinese files after OCR processing. Therefore, a good Chinese OCR program should allow users to export files as some common output formats.
• Support batch OCR---Most of the users prefer to take pictures to OCR Chinese language, but the picture can be only saved in individual image file. If batch OCR allowed, users can save a lot time to do Chinese OCR on imported images.

Best Chinese OCR Software for Mac 

If you want to do Chinese OCR on mac, you will need the help of professional Chinese OCR tool. And the best Chinese OCR software for mac goes to Cisdem PDF OCR Converter OCR, the best PDF Converter for Mac, enabling users to convert native, scanned PDF and images into 16 formats, including PDF to Word, Excel, PPTX, ePub, Text, HTML, etc.

Best Chinese OCR for Mac

• Perform OCR on PDF or Images in Chinese;
• Accurately recognize about 200 languages, Chinese, Arabic, English, Japanese,etc.;
• Batch Chinese OCR is supported;
• Advanced OCR settings to export file as preferred format;
• Convert native and protected PDFs to 16 formats;
• Create PDF from virtually all documents in Chinese or other languages;

Free Download

How to Do Chinese OCR PDF on Mac?

(Cisdem supports OCR Chinese from both PDF and Image files, here we take Chinese OCR PDF as an example)

1. Download Cisdem PDF Converter OCR to your Mac, install it.
   Free Download
2. Import single or multiple Chinese PDF for character recognition.
   You can drag and drop to import files, or click “+” to add Chinese files in PDF or or image format since Cisdem supports both PDF and image input.
3. Prepare for Chinese OCR setting.
   You need to turn the OCR button On first after uploading PDF files, then choose file language as Chinese. Don’t forget to select output format as Text or Docx if you want to OCR Chinese PDF to Text or Word format.
4. Advanced Chinese OCR Settings.
   For more accurate OCR results, you can click the "Settings" icon. A new interface will appear, with each part of the OCR applied zone marked as Texts, Images or Tables in different colorful boxes. You can check if all the contents are marked correctly, if not, manually adjust. For example, if you want a part recognized as Table, remove the defaulted mark box, click on "Mark Tables" under OCR Applied Zone toolbars, then drag a mark box to select the contents you want to recognize as Tables.
5. Start Chinese OCR PDF on Mac.
   Click “Convert” to start the Chinese OCR process. Get the editable Chinese file in output folder. You will find the Chinese OCR is processed accurately and fast.

Best Chinese OCR Software for Windows

For Windows users who want to do Chinese OCR on PDF or image , Readiris Pro 17 is highly recommended. It is an OCR software kit to convert scans, image and scanned PDF into Excel, Word, PowerPoint, searchable PDF or other writable file formats. It is capable of recognizing 138 languages, including Chinese. But it is more than an OCR converter, you can utilize this tool to create PDF, annotate, merge, split, compress, modify and protect PDF files too. 

1. Open Chinese file with Readiris 17 on your Windows.
2. Select language as Chinese, choose output format.
3. Save the file as editable format after Chinese OCR.

Best Chinese OCR App Online Free

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 OCR.

#1 Google Chinese OCR

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. 

1. Login in Google Account and go to Google Drive.
2. Upload Chinese PDF or images into Google Drive by clicking “New” or directly drag and drop into the right panel.
3. Open Chinese file with Google Docs by right click on the file. Google Docs will perform OCR on the Chinese file automatically.
4. (Optional) Check the Google Chinese OCR result, manually adjust or edit if needed;
5. Go to File>Download as, choose your preferred output format. 

Things You Need to Pay Attention to Google Chinese OCR

• Google OCR supports Chinese files in scanned PDF and Images (JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP);
• Check and manually adjust OCR result due to unstable OCR performance of Google Docs;
• Don't upload complicate Chinese file for OCR, the OCR results may be quite poor;
• Google Chinese OCR doesn’t support batch OCR
• Don't upload private files for Chinese OCR due to potential risk of information leakage when storing files on 3rd server;

#2 Convertio Chinese OCR

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.

1. Go to Convertio OCR;
2. Upload PDF or image Chinese files from local or other online sources;
3. Choose file language as Chinese, then select output and page range;
4. Then click “Recognize” button to start Convertio Chinese OCR;

Disadvantages of Convertio Chinese OCR

• Only 10 pages can be done with Chinese OCR for free;
• Unstable Chinese OCR result especially when working on complicate files;
• Potential risk of information leakage;

Best Chinese OCR App for Android or iPhone

Best Chinese OCR App for iPhone

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

• Recognize files in 70 languages: Chinese, Russian, German, Japanese, etc;
• Translate files to 90+ languages;
• Extract and copy texts from image-based file;
• Share texts on social media platform easily;

How to Do Chinese OCR and Translate on iPhone?

1. Download and install Scan & Translate on your iPhone;
2. Select language as Chinese;
3. Import Chinese files from photo library or take a picture of the document, then press Scan;
4. Once the Chinese OCR is done, select the target language to translate the Chinese files.

Best Chinese OCR App for Android Phone

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

• Recognize text from photos or camera;
• Export Chinese files as Text or PDF format;
• Recognize 50+ languages, including Chinese;
• Recognized text can be save to clipboard;

How to do Chinese OCR on Android Phone?

1. Download and install Text Fairy on your Android phone;
2. Choose the Chinese file photo or capture from your camera to import for Chinese OCR;
3. Then Click “Continue” to run OCR Chinese;
4. Once ready, save the Chinese texts to clipboard or export Chinese files as PDF.

Final Thoughts

As per my personal experience, online free solutions are basically falling short of our expectations to get accurate Chinese OCR, for difficulty in performing Chinese OCR itself, also for the reason of online limited features. Consequently, for mac users, you can try Cisdem OCR PDF Converter for Mac, and for Windows users, Readiris is the best option, both guarantee a fast and accurate Chinese OCR for users.