The headline feature of this release is the Image Reader, in both apps. It’s on Android now, with iOS to follow.

Image Reader

Pick a photo or screenshot, take a picture, paste an image, or share one into Hanping from another app, and the Image Reader picks out each line of Chinese where it sits in the picture. Find it in the navigation drawer, or tap the camera icon in the search box.

Tap a highlighted line to look it up. The line appears at the top of the panel with its entry below, and dragging the panel up shows the words that make it up. When the line is a whole sentence with no dictionary entry of its own, the Translate button translates it for you.

A line on a menu or a sign is often several words run together, so you can tap any word in the line at the top of the panel to look up just that word, then drag the selection handles to adjust it further. Tap the word again to go back to the whole line.

Real-world photos aren’t always tidy. When reading the whole image at once misses lines or runs them together, switch to a horizontal band (for one line or a few lines of horizontal text) or a vertical band (for a column of vertical text, or one column of a page set in columns). The band stays put while you move the image under it, and Hanping reads just the text inside.

Here, reading the whole image took handwriting on squared paper (from Hacking Chinese’s 36 samples of Chinese handwriting) for vertical text; a horizontal band over the first line reads it the right way round.

For a page with a lot of text, Open in Document Reader sends everything recognized to the Document Reader as paragraphs.

The Image Reader is a one-time purchase, and one purchase covers both Hanping Chinese Dictionary and Hanping Cantonese Dictionary on all your devices — just sign in to the same Hanping account on each. You can try it first on three of your own images, and the sample images are always free. See the documentation for more.

Other improvements in this release:

  • Bug fixes and stability improvements

Get Hanping Chinese Dictionary on Google Play Store and Apple App Store

Get Hanping Cantonese Dictionary on Google Play Store and Apple App Store

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