NômCam: Hán Nôm OCR Scanner

NômCam reads Chữ Nôm and Hán from a photograph. Point it at your family's genealogy book, a gravestone in the cemetery, a royal edict in a communal house or a page of an old book, and it gives you the characters and how to read them in Vietnamese. WHAT IT READS Genealogies, gravestones, royal edicts, parallel couplets, temple boards, woodblock books, manuscripts and stele rubbings. Printed, carved and handwritten characters all work; flowing cursive is harder. READS A WHOLE PAGE Every column on the page is found automatically and read in order, right to left or left to right, and you can tap the columns yourself to set any order you like. Or switch to Manual and draw the boxes yourself, around one row or one column at a time. READS THE WHOLE COLUMN AT ONCE Characters that touch each other are not cut apart and guessed one by one. The whole column is read in a single pass, which is what old woodblock printing and handwriting need. CHOOSES READINGS THAT MAKE SENSE Characters and readings are chosen together over the whole line, using a Chữ Nôm dictionary, Vietnamese word evidence and the characters either side, so a line reads as Vietnamese rather than as a list of syllables. Lines in classical Chinese are detected and read in Hán Việt. HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT IS UNSURE OF A reading borrowed from a variant or guessed from a sound component is marked, never shown as though it were attested. Characters whose runners up were close are flagged in orange. YOURS TO CORRECT Tap any character to see the piece of the photograph it came from, what it means, its other readings and other characters the line's context allows. Choose one and the line is read again around your choice. Every change can be undone, and readings you teach it are remembered. COPY IT OUT One tap copies the characters, another copies the readings, ready to paste into your notes, a message or an article. WORKS ANYWHERE Reading runs entirely on the device, including in the middle of a cemetery or a village temple with no signal. No account, no tracking, and your photographs never leave your phone unless you choose to send one to the developer to help the app read better. One more exception: a character so rare that no font on your phone can draw it is fetched once as a picture and kept, and you can switch that off in Settings.