How to take a photo of some written Chinese and have it show up on the screen without, preferably, using any A Pee Pees? Recommendations for the best web based OCR tool basically. Thanks.
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Google Translate.
Chinese to Chinese Traditional
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Caveat: I make no claims; in fact Iām not even sure I know what youāre talking about. In the past, I tried an online OCR device for an image (or images) of English text (or a device that was downloadableāit was so long ago that I donāt remember exactly what kind of device it was), and the result was an unintentionally-humorous failure (ah, hereās a post with a quote of the failure).
But after an ordinary Google search, I just now found this device. I tested it with an image of a few Traditional Chinese characters screen-captured from a Google Translate page using IrfanView image software. (The text is a Chinese translation of a small part of Abraham Lincolnās Gettysburg AddressāI didnāt use Google Translate for the translationāit had already been translated.)
For those few characters, it seems to have worked that one time. Thatās all I can say.
Hereās an image of the results:
But again, I make no guarantees of any kind about this device, and that also means that I canāt guarantee that thereās nothing harmful about the device.
Anyway, I hope this helps, or at least does no harm.
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Plecoās āstill imageā OCR function is pretty good, assuming you have good lighting and youāre not trying to scan a book that has text too close to the center (warped image). It still gets similar characters wrong sometimes (ä¼° vs ä½ was driving me nuts last week), but otherwise it gets most of the text right.
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Itās alright Iām not translating nuclear launch codes. Well not yet anyway, who knows what the future holds for me here.
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Thanks, you appear to love Pleco. Unfortunately my phone has what I am coining as āAndroid cancerā. The disk usage just keeps growing, I keep deleting apps, now there is not enough space to upgrade or do anything. Pleco is the last and only app I have left, I refuse to delete it because it is so useful. Perhaps it is the problem?
I hope Iām not the only person on here who loves Pleco. If youāre going to need one app for Chinese survival, Pleco would be the one. But I would imagine it takes up an enormous amount of space ā itās all offline, including the OCR. Maybe contact the Pleco people and ask? I know theyāve posted on Chinese Forums, but you might also get to them faster with an email
Anyone with some further recommendations for OCR on handwritten input? Many thanks.
I think that maybe Google Lens can sorta do that sometimes. 
Or maybe it can do it regularly, but I donāt know.
For Chinese, that was a first-time thing for me. Earlier I tried handwritten English (a soldier writing a letter home), and it worked pretty well. Then I realized Iād read too hastily and misunderstood your post, so I went looking for handwritten Chinese.
Some time ago I tried it on something that looked like Arabic, but the image was pretty indistinct, if I remember correctly.
But Iām guessing you want something that can do a lot of it at one time. Iām not sure about that. This is terra incognita for me.
I wish I could be of better assistance, but thatās all Iāve got. Hopefully, someone will come up with something better.
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Thanks, apologies I was unclear, reading it back. Iām actually surprised recognition of handwriting isnāt further along, technologically I mean.
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No apology necessary. Really I should apologize. Iām really afraid Iām wasting your time, because you have practical concerns.
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Not exactly what is requested here, but I found this OCR tool recently which helped me a lot (on MacOS).
You can āmake a screenshotā of a section of your screen, and any character in the screenshot will be copied to the clipboard and translated in a menubar popup.
This is different from Google Translate, because this tool allows you to recognize the characters from a sentence (not selectable) inside a picture for example. (Similar to Lens, but on your computer instead of using your phone camera)
There are many tools and add-ons that allow to translate (with a popup, etc.) text that can be selected on a webpage, but this is the first one I found that works well for the text inside an image. You have to pay however, about $10-$15/Y to get unlimited translations, otherwise you get a limited amount. After using it for a few days, I bought the yearly sub. Very helpful for me. (Shopee ads with Chinese text embedded in pictures for example)
Most newer iphones can screenshot and convert text now; chatgpt also does a pretty great job of picking up handwritten notes and transcribing them.
ChatGPT - upload a jpg image and ask it to transcribe, then if you need it translate to your language of choice
Itās brand new, but (so far) Googleās Gemini Flash 2 beats all the OpenAI options handily on the OCR front. 