Poricom

Since certain calligraphers and writers tend to prioritize the style and beauty of their fonts and handwritten notes for contributing to a better overall reading experience, the level of readability can suffer in the process, which is where Poricom comes into play, with its support for recognizing Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English characters while copying them to the clipboard for translation purposes.

Booting up the portable app will launch a minimalist interface with controls organized in four main tabs that display descriptions when hovering on their dedicated icons for new users to get accustomed to each button’s functions and purpose and get a reminder when necessary. To start with, one can open PDF or comic book archive files directly, or access entire directories to browse their subfolders and images in alphabetical or numerical order while previewing them on the right side.

The scanning process acts similarly to Windows’ built-in Snipping Tool, with users being able to drag their cursor across an area of the current image to form a rectangular selection and hold it to see the text detected in the upper left corner of the app’s preview section. This function may come in handy for quickly recognizing small numbers of phrases as opposed to entire documents.

For those testing applications written for Japanese markets, an External Capture method can be activated for capturing non-selectable text in various menus by using a combination of the Alt and Q hotkeys to copy them to the clipboard for quickly pasting it into a translator service.

In terms of customization, the second tab allows you to switch between the white and dark theme of the interface for a more comfortable nighttime usage experience. Those with lower visual acuity can also change the font type and size of the preview text, making it more readable if necessary, while multitaskers have the option of previewing two images at once to speed up the recognition process across two document pages.

For large-resolution images with smaller text, one can temporarily disable the recognition control scheme in favor of using the cursor to pan on an image and the scroll wheel to zoom in or out to easily reach the part meant to be analyzed. In order to avoid clashes with other programs’ shortcuts, the activation hotkey combination can be changed to suit users’ preferences.

While Poricom does come equipped with the MangaOCR standard suitable for Japanese text, the more popular Tesseract version can also be employed to support other languages such as Korean, Chinese and English, thus increasing the app’s level of versatility. Finally, to avoid having to use a clipboard manager when extracting multiple instances of recognized text, the program can record and save all the scanned characters to a text file for later use in your research projects.

Whether you are a translator looking for a fast-paced utility that can recognize handwritten Japanese characters more easily, or you are just beginning to learn the language of an Asian country you are planning to visit, Poricom can be an incredibly useful application that recognizes, copies to the clipboard and displays various characters in a more accessible manner.