Screenulate

This project is a work-in-progress.

Optical character recognition of Japanese phrases. Kanji and reading lookup with JMdict/KANJIDIC. Rikaichan-like tokenization and parsing. All so that I can read my visual novels.

Uses Tesseract-OCR for OCR, then tokenizes text for dictionary lookup. The goal of this project is not machine translation, it is for quick lookup of unfamiliar words/phrases/places.

Usage

ALT+Q           Enter screen capture mode
` (OEM_TILDE)   Reuse previous screen capture region

In screen capture mode, click and drag to select a region to read (will appear as a red rectangle). The previous region you selected will appear as a green rectangle. In screen capture mode,

ESC             Exit screen capture mode
SPACE           Reuse previous screen capture region

After you complete the capture, the source text and translated text will appear in Screenulate.

FAQ

Is it done?

No.

Why does it take so long before tokenization is ready?

Creating the structures required for parsing takes some time (and about a gigabyte of RAM).

Why is text not being recognized properly?

Try these following things in order:

• Examine if the post-processed image is unclear/unreadable.

  • If the image is too small, try enlargening the source text if possible (even if it's a resampled scale, it will help).
  • If the image is noisy, or there are bridges between characters,
    • Remove any non-solid background behind the text if possible
    • Use the context menu of the scan preview to apply transformations to the image before Tesseract processing (e.g. thresholding)

• Ensure you are using the latest version of Tesseract-OCR with the correct support libraries