iPad 3 / Still OCR

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Looks like it has an autofocus camera, so at long last you should be able to do decent OCR with an iPad, though inherent the ergonomic issues in precisely aiming a 1.5-pound magazine-sized gadget at a piece of paper to scan in characters remain. (should be pretty good for taking photos of pages, though - saves the extra step of moving them over from your phone)

Screen-wise, we've already made Retina versions of the few iPad-specific graphic assets that weren't Retina-ified a year and a half ago for the iPhone 4, so we'll drop those into our soon-to-be-submitted 2.2.11 update and hopefully have that out right around the time people are starting to get their new iPads. (though if there's a glut of other developers submitting updates it may take a bit longer)
 

character

状元
Re: iPad 3

I'm really looking forward to the new iPad; reading in bed with the iPad 2 is tough because of the screen.

I'm sure in a few months there will be an iPad stand for scanning documents.
 

dcarpent

榜眼
Re: iPad 3

Anyone notice how prominently China played in the Apple iPad video? I thought this was quite striking. Three of the opening scenes were set in China, as far as I could tell (note the characters in the sign inside the bus and on the street), not to mention all the Asians in general. This seems very intentional. Too bad Pleco didn't make a cameo. It would have fit right in!
 

character

状元
Re: iPad 3

The new iPad seems like an opportunity for a new YT video:

"Reading Chinese doesn't have to be hard"
Someone takes a picture of a page of Chinese text with the iPad, OCR runs, and then the person taps a few of the characters. Link to Pleco in the App Store appears. This scenario would look even better if there was a startup setting to hide the recognized characters.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: iPad 3

character said:
I'm sure in a few months there will be an iPad stand for scanning documents.

Seems likely, though the angles may be a bit tricky - may need a separate app that does perspective correction. (or we'll have to add it ourselves)

dcarpent said:
Anyone notice how prominently China played in the Apple iPad video? I thought this was quite striking. Three of the opening scenes were set in China, as far as I could tell (note the characters in the sign inside the bus and on the street), not to mention all the Asians in general. This seems very intentional. Too bad Pleco didn't make a cameo. It would have fit right in!

Oh Apple's definitely paying more attention to China now - wasn't a coincidence that the winner of their 25-billionth-app-download contest was from China.

character said:
"Reading Chinese doesn't have to be hard"
Someone takes a picture of a page of Chinese text with the iPad, OCR runs, and then the person taps a few of the characters. Link to Pleco in the App Store appears. This scenario would look even better if there was a startup setting to hide the recognized characters.

Could work, though again, awkward angles - the iPhone is really a much better device for document scanning.
 

character

状元
Re: iPad !!!

[Aside: Live OCR is cool, but capturing an image and reading from that is how I have come to prefer to use it. So I wouldn't worry about an iPad being awkward to use to look up words through live OCR.]

mikelove said:
Could work, though again, awkward angles - the iPhone is really a much better device for document scanning.
Sure, but the new iPad offers a much better story for Pleco: "with just an iPad and Pleco, my Chinese study needs are handled. I can do everything I need to with them: dictionary lookup, handwriting, reading, flashcards. I don't have to mess with multiple devices or carry anything else."

Once you're sure Pleco is happy on the new iPad, it might be worth some marketing to students/schools -- marketing to students often seems to revolve around how something will simplify their 'busy' lives, and you can use that theme this time. To me the new iPad looks like a good opportunity for Pleco, but I'm sure you know best.

Do you know if Pleco [and add-ons] plays well with the Apple Configurator? http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/ ... s_devices/ That seems important to support for the education market, and worth mentioning to schools if it does.
 

scykei

榜眼
Re: iPad 3

I just hope apps that don't support retina display on this new iPad won't look so terrible as it did on the iPhone 4. I don't expect many apps and games to be updated for this new capability considering how insanely large they would need the textures to be. :S
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: iPad 3

character said:
Sure, but the new iPad offers a much better story for Pleco: "with just an iPad and Pleco, my Chinese study needs are handled. I can do everything I need to with them: dictionary lookup, handwriting, reading, flashcards. I don't have to mess with multiple devices or carry anything else."

True, but it's tough to keep an iPad in your pocket.

character said:
Once you're sure Pleco is happy on the new iPad, it might be worth some marketing to students/schools -- marketing to students often seems to revolve around how something will simplify their 'busy' lives, and you can use that theme this time. To me the new iPad looks like a good opportunity for Pleco, but I'm sure you know best.

2.2.11 will be iPad-Retina-optimized, but in 2.3 we're actually making much heavier use of iPad-specific UI controls (popovers, center-of-the-screen dialogs, etc) so that would be a better time to push our iPad support.

scykei said:
I just hope apps that don't support retina display on this new iPad won't look so terrible as it did on the iPhone 4. I don't expect many apps and games to be updated for this new capability considering how insanely large they would need the textures to be. :S

Well programming-wise it's exactly the same system they use for Retina iPhones, so Universal apps will probably already be mostly optimized. We only needed to Retina-ify two dozen or so images that were iPad-specific, along with Retina-enabling the function that turns white icons into gray ones for the iPad toolbar.

As far as the looks of non-optimized apps - to be honest they probably will be similarly fuzzy-looking, especially with text / system icons / etc being nice and Retina-optimized, but I think almost any popular iPad game would be updated - even if they keep their old textures they can still benefit from the sharper lines. And most of the 2D games have relatively modest-sized tilesets so the extra 30 MB of 3G download size that Apple just added should cover them nicely - Angry Birds / Where's My Water / Cut The Rope etc probably only have a few MB of actual graphics files in them.
 

scykei

榜眼
Re: iPad 3

Yeah, but considering how much work the developers already put in to upscale their textures for iPhone retina displays and iPads a few years back, I can't imagine how they are going to make it another four times larger. I think that most of the games which have already been released will be left this way. Only the newer projects will finally get to utilize this feature.

I just wish that instead of smoothing out the textures, the iPad would keep them like they are supposed to be, by using the four pixels to display one to maintain proper compatibility with older apps.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: iPad 3

scykei said:
Yeah, but considering how much work the developers already put in to upscale their textures for iPhone retina displays and iPads a few years back, I can't imagine how they are going to make it another four times larger. I think that most of the games which have already been released will be left this way. Only the newer projects will finally get to utilize this feature.

Well it depends on how widely played the game is - for popular titles I imagine extra sales alone would justify it, for less popular ones they could always consider offering new textures as an in-app purchase. Might elicit some grumbling, but at least they'd have the option, and if you just paid $700 for a new iPad I daresay you can spare a dollar or two to to support a hard-working developer (though it's a somewhat different feeling if you're dealing with a bigger company like EA).

scykei said:
I just wish that instead of smoothing out the textures, the iPad would keep them like they are supposed to be, by using the four pixels to display one to maintain proper compatibility with older apps.

I believe that game developers actually have some control over that - in fact, even some new games may go with upscaled graphics since the iPad's limited memory bandwidth is going to make full 2048x1536 resolution a stretch.
 

numble

状元
Re: iPad 3

mikelove said:
True, but it's tough to keep an iPad in your pocket.
The iPad is a cheaper device than an iPhone, even when the required data/voice plans for an iPhone are not taken into account. Its big screen also offers a better reading environment.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: iPad 3

numble said:
The iPad is a cheaper device than an iPhone, even when the required data/voice plans for an iPhone are not taken into account. Its big screen also offers a better reading environment.

Cheaper than a 4S, but not cheaper than a previous-generation iPhone (or a midrange Android phone, for that matter). And certainly not cheaper than a device that you already own.

I do think that we ought to define the iPad version of the Pleco as a bit more of a distinct experience, perhaps even with some tablet-exclusive features that wouldn't be feasible on a smaller screen - a more desktop-y flashcard list manager, say, or a split-screen reader view. However, nowadays most of the people who own an iPad own some sort of Pleco-compatible smartphone too, and we'd rather serve them on both devices than just one. So I'd prefer not to spend too much time marketing Pleco specifically as a tablet app to the detriment of its smartphone version.
 

radioman

状元
Re: iPad 3

sorry if this is in the wrong place on the forum...

With specific regard to the reader, is there any progress on a PDF reader function for those PDFs that have been OCRed? (or have you come up with another way to skin that cat?). I would be happy to test a beta version, or an alpha... pre alpha, etc.

As a side note, iPhone 4s is a nice step up with regard to character recognition speed during OCR operation. Really nice.
 

character

状元
Re: iPad 3

mikelove said:
So I'd prefer not to spend too much time marketing Pleco specifically as a tablet app to the detriment of its smartphone version.
Thanks; I see your concern. Don't want to make people think Pleco requires a tablet when the smartphone market is much bigger. I just thought the new iPad was an opportunity to get some additional attention/sales for Pleco.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Re: iPad 3

radioman said:
With specific regard to the reader, is there any progress on a PDF reader function for those PDFs that have been OCRed? (or have you come up with another way to skin that cat?). I would be happy to test a beta version, or an alpha... pre alpha, etc.

That's probably only going to happen later in the year - it'd be a nice feature, but I think supporting EPUB is going to have to take priority since we're getting a lot more requests for that of late.

character said:
Thanks; I see your concern. Don't want to make people think Pleco requires a tablet when the smartphone market is much bigger. I just thought the new iPad was an opportunity to get some additional attention/sales for Pleco.

Oh yes, certainly, though I'll feel better about that when we have a more decisively tablet-optimized interface.
 

Vzzzbx

进士
Re: iPad 3

When I tell people I'm upgrading from an iPad 2, people look at me oddly until I show them how many Chinese character strokes get lost between the iPad 2's pixels. That alone is the perfect reason to upgrade. Those who used Pleco on a pre-iPhone 4 and upgraded will know exactly what I'm talking about.

The autofocus camera will definitely come in useful for OCR and, er, not much else. I've not used my iPad 2's camera once.
 

radioman

状元
Re: iPad 3

Understood.

Setting PDF aside for a second, let me try modifying my idea/request a bit, to address photos instead. This approach provides a potentially broader, more useful solution.

My current method is to just move the pdf into the iPad into some PDF reader (GoodReader usually). No OCR content. Then I just take screen-captures of the pages of interest. So you get to class, take 5 or 10 snapshots for the course work you are about to embark and they are sitting in your saved photos.

Pleco OCR is fast, overall very accurate (as long as the original photo/ screen capture was clean enough) - just takes a second or two. Really great. And in many ways more accurate than typically OCRed PDF files as Pleco allows you to on the fly adjust the size of the OCR area box.

But, by far the large percentage of time, and the sloppiest part of the process, is when its time to review the next photo. You have to bail out of your OCRed "Photo", go looking for the next photo, hope you find the right one (many times since its just text, its difficult to tell so you open it and its wrong), restart the OCR, reposition the box, etc.

My thought is, it would be really useful is there was a way in Photo OCR Block Read mode where you can just open a photo, Pleco-OCR it (like you do now).. BUT, there would be a new function where you can simply swipe or arrow to the next or previous photo. I figure that anyone taking multiple photos for OCR interpretation is likely taking the photos in order.

And as for the OCR Highlight box, it would just be left in the same position as the previous photo. Of course the user could then reposition if desired or necessary.

Some Scenarios:

Scenario 1 - I am going to go to my school. iPad in my backpack, iPhone in my hand. In the lobby of my apartment is a new 5 page document posted by building management. I don't have the time (or full Chinese skillset!), so I take pictures of the document with my iPhone, one picture for each page. Then I get to the Wifi-enabled place I'm going (most are) and iCloud moves all the photos to the iPad via Photostream without me doing anything. Then I open Pleco on the iPad, and the documents are ready be imported and read.

Scenario 2 - In class, my teacher wants us to reference a PDF document I already have in my iPad. In this case, I simply open the PDF on the iPad and screen capture the pages of interest. (letter size or a4, both work well with iPad full screen capture that is brought into Pleco Reader. Pleco OCRs the doc, and I can page to the next one.

Scenario 3 - Video stills with Chinese Subtitles - not a movie, but if you could get the video stills with subtitles, you could study the sentences in Pleco while having the benefit of the video context. Swipe to the next "still" and the OCR region has already been defined based on the last photo.


mikelove said:
radioman said:
With specific regard to the reader, is there any progress on a PDF reader function for those PDFs that have been OCRed? (or have you come up with another way to skin that cat?). I would be happy to test a beta version, or an alpha... pre alpha, etc.

That's probably only going to happen later in the year - it'd be a nice feature, but I think supporting EPUB is going to have to take priority since we're getting a lot more requests for that of late.
 

character

状元
Re: iPad 3

radioman said:
But, by far the large percentage of time, and the sloppiest part of the process, is when its time to review the next photo. You have to bail out of your OCRed "Photo", go looking for the next photo, hope you find the right one (many times since its just text, its difficult to tell so you open it and its wrong), restart the OCR, reposition the box, etc.

My thought is, it would be really useful is there was a way in Photo OCR Block Read mode where you can just open a photo, Pleco-OCR it (like you do now).. BUT, there would be a new function where you can simply swipe or arrow to the next or previous photo. I figure that anyone taking multiple photos for OCR interpretation is likely taking the photos in order.

And as for the OCR Highlight box, it would just be left in the same position as the previous photo. Of course the user could then reposition if desired or necessary.
I would benefit from this as well. Combine these changes with an option for hiding the OCR results on startup and the OCR-based reading experience would be much improved.
 

radioman

状元
Re: iPad 3

I agree with Character about hiding the OCR results. Perhaps, like the highlighted OCR area box position, just have the OCR green be in whatever state/position you had it set on the previous photo.

Some more ideas...
- In this new mode, there would be no need for the capture or the clip functions at the bottom. Replace the capture and clip function with previous or next photos, respectively.
- Provide high contrast, so within the green box, do not change change the background shading (leave it per the original photo). This would benefit my poor eyesight.
- Leave the "show characters" box in place, so that you can still check if necessary if there are OCR issues.

One more "reinforcement" point about reading like this on an iPad. With Hanzi as the source material, the need for clarity is obvious. I'm not young, and my eyes are not the greatest. If you have reading material on the iPad, and flip it landscape, it makes it much easier to read as the text is significantly larger than just reading a paper document. Others in my class with worse eyesight struggle. Me using an iPad... not so much.
 

yoose

探花
Re: iPad 3

radioman said:
But, by far the large percentage of time, and the sloppiest part of the process, is when its time to review the next photo. You have to bail out of your OCRed "Photo", go looking for the next photo, hope you find the right one (many times since its just text, its difficult to tell so you open it and its wrong), restart the OCR, reposition the box, etc.

My thought is, it would be really useful is there was a way in Photo OCR Block Read mode where you can just open a photo, Pleco-OCR it (like you do now).. BUT, there would be a new function where you can simply swipe or arrow to the next or previous photo. I figure that anyone taking multiple photos for OCR interpretation is likely taking the photos in order.

And as for the OCR Highlight box, it would just be left in the same position as the previous photo. Of course the user could then reposition if desired or necessary.

i agree with this, i was actually about to post the same thing. swiping might be hard since you need to swipe around to move the photo if you are zoomed in, but perhaps some sort of film strip on the iPad, there is plenty of room. Having a row of pictures at the top that you can just select would be very nice. also now the app only looks in the root folder for pictures. I wanted to organize it into a different folder, but when i did those pictures do not appear in the list.
 
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