OCR Chinese PDF — Simplified and Traditional
Make scanned Chinese PDFs searchable. Supports both Simplified (Mainland China) and Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong) characters.
Chinese OCR is harder than European languages because the character set is huge (~5,000 common characters in modern use, ~10,000+ in literary or technical content) and characters can be visually similar. PDFOnly supports both Simplified Chinese (used in Mainland China and Singapore) and Traditional Chinese (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) via dedicated Tesseract language packs.
Use cases: digitizing scanned Chinese contracts and business documents; processing customer-uploaded scans from Greater China markets; making Chinese academic papers or books searchable for citation and reference; building searchable archives of historical Chinese-language documents. After OCR, the Chinese text supports Ctrl+F search, copy-paste into other apps, and indexing by Chinese-language search engines.
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Frequently asked questions
Should I pick Simplified or Traditional?
Pick whichever your source document uses. If you don't know: documents from Mainland China and Singapore use Simplified (fewer strokes per character); documents from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau use Traditional (more complex characters). If unsure, pick both — Tesseract can handle mixed but accuracy is best with the matched character set.
How accurate is Chinese OCR?
On clean modern scans at 300 DPI: 90-95% character-level accuracy. Older or handwritten Chinese drops sharply (handwriting recognition is a separate, harder problem we don't solve here). For best results, scan at 300 DPI minimum and ensure straight orientation.
Does it handle vertical Chinese text?
Modern Tesseract handles vertical text in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean reasonably well. Old printed books with right-to-left page order may need additional pre-processing — contact us if you have a large archive of vertical-text material to digitize.