Hi,
I'm about to start inputting the text from my new textbook (Chinese in Steps 3/步步高中文3).

However, I'm really pushed for time, so I'm hoping that I can scan the pages and copy and paste the text, thanks to Skritter getting rid of duplicates :). Has anyone had any success with OCR for simplified Chinese characters?

P.S. Skritter you are awesome, I just accidentally exited this page and it remembered my post :) the little things do get noticed!

We used ABBYY FineReader to do it once; it turned out okay. It wasn't an amazingly fast or accurate process.

I use AABBY all the time for German, but haven't tried it for Chinese. I am about to upgrade (from 9 to 11) so may try it after then. They also have a product called PDF Transformer which may work for you - it is cheaper and colleagues say it is very good.

Margaret

Thanks :).
Having looked at this and other, free, options, I've resigned myself to writing them all with pinyin, as it's not really slower than scanning and checking every page.

It depends how much checking you have to do. I have to do much less than 1% with German.

That's impressive!
I tried various open source or free Chinese OCR software, but nothing anywhere near that accuracy. I think this is one of the things that you have to pay for!

If you want it only for making flashcards, then Pleco can do it. You can export them to Skritter afterwards. It works faster than typing pinyin, but it's not free.

ABBY performance does really depend on the quality of the source when scanning Chinese characters. When scanning from a commercial quality ebook, it's pretty good, but it makes enough mistakes that I rarely use it. And it is almost worthless for snapshots taken with a digital camera of a page.

For English, it is very, very good. I use it all the time when making Anki flashcards out of Kindle and Nook sources.

Pleco looks really good actually - I use it all the time but I've never looked at the paid things becuase I thought they were really expensive, but it looks like the OCR part is only £7.99 so totally worth trying out. Thanks for the hint :)

Edit: just tried the demo version by pointing my phone at a random web page in chinese - it worked amazingly well!! :D

What's people's experience with Pleco OCR without an iPhone? They say the iPod Touch camera is not good enough.

Actually, I withdraw my question - it's possible to download a demo, and it works quite well.