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, you will need to do Chinese OCR with OCR software to make the file editable first.

Free Solutions for Chinese OCR

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.

#Use Google Docs to Do Chinese OCR

Google offers an online platform for its members to manage documents. In Google Drive, you can upload Chinese PDF files and open with Google Docs. Before going to Google, save your Chinese file in PDF format.

1. Login in Google Account and go to Google Drive.
2. Upload Chinese PDF into Google Drive.
3. Open Chinese file with Google Docs by right click on the file. Google Docs will perform OCR on the Chinese file automatically.
4. Save the file and download as editable formats after Chinese OCR in Google.

Please don’t upload complicate Chinese file for OCR, the OCR results may be quite poor.

#Use Online OCR Service to Do Chinese OCR

Also, you can use online OCR service to do Chinese OCR for free. We are recommending OnlineOCR. For more options, you can search in Google and have a try yourself.

1. Go to OnlineOCR and upload Chinese files in PDF.
2. Select language and output format.
3. Start the Chinese OCR process and download the editable file instantly.

Please do not upload highly private files for Chinese OCR.

Best Chinese OCR Software for Mac Users

If you want to do Chinese OCR on mac, you will need the help of professional Chinese OCR PDF Converter for Mac to get accurate results, after all, Chinese OCR is more difficult that that of other languages due to many characters in Chinese.

And the best Chinese OCR software for mac users goes to Cisdem PDF Converter OCR, the best PDF Converter for Mac, enabling users to convert native, scanned and encrypted PDF files into 16 editable formats, including PDF to Word, Excel, PPTX, ePub, Text, HTML, etc. It can accurately recognize about 50 languages, including Chinese, English, Spanish, French, etc. Batch Chinese OCR is supported.

Steps to do Chinese OCR with Cisdem PDF Converter OCR for Mac

1. Upload single or multiple Chinese files into Cisdem by drag and drop.
2. Customize Chinese OCR setting.
   Turn the OCR function ON, choose page range, output format and select language as Chinese. 
3. Start Chinese OCR.
   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.

Other recommended Chinese OCR software for mac users:

• OCR Wizard(OCR on PDF and Image)
• ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac
• Readiris Pro 15 Mac

Best Chinese OCR Software for Windows Users

For Windows users who want to do Chinese OCR, Readiris 16 is highly recommended. It is an OCR software kit to convert image and scanned PDF into Excel, Word, or other writable file formats. It is capable of recognizing 130 languages, including Chinese. However, it can not perform batch Chinese OCR.

1. Open Chinese file with Readiris 16.
2. Select language as Chinese, choose output format.
3. Save the file as editable format after Chinese OCR.

Other recommended Chinese OCR software for Windows users:

• ABBYYFineReader
• OminiPage

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.