kanjipad

Japanese Handwriting Recognition

KanjiPad is a very simple program for handwriting recognition. The user draws a character into the box, then requests translation. The best candidates are displayed along the right hand side of the window and can be selected for pasting into other programs. It is meant primarily for dictionary purposes for learners of Japanese. It does not support entering kana, so its usefulness as an input method is limited. Furthermore, if you already know the reading of a character, conventional pronunciation-based methods of entering the character are probably faster. However, KanjiPad is sometimes useful for entering very unusual characters, even if the pronunciation is known, because pronunciation-based input methods often fail for rarely used characters.