JTegaki is a Japanese handwriting recognition tool/engine available for Windows, Linux and OS X.
It is written in Java and licensed under the GNU GPL v3.
News
08.01.2012 / jTegaki v0.2 - improved recognition speed and accuracy
1.) Ensure that the Java Runtime Environment is installed on your system.
You need Java 1.7 or later
2.) Download and unzip JTegaki to a directory of your choice
3a.) Windows Users: Double-click on jTegaki.exe
3b.) Other OSs: open a command prompt, go to the directory and type in: java -jar jTegaki.jar
Features & Usage
JTegaki is an on-line (i.e. recognize-as-you-draw) recognition tool for Japanese characters.
It contains patterns for all Hiragana, Katakana and
Jouyou-Kanji.
Its main feature is the ability
to handle:
stroke order variations (i.e. recognizing a Kanji with strokes drawn in the wrong order) and
stroke number variations (i.e. recognizing a Kanji with concatenated strokes, allowing for a more
natural writing style).
Recognized characters can be copied to the system-clipboard with a single click. JTegaki's capabilities and simple usage are best
illustrated with the following video:
During my time in Japan, I had trouble remembering the Kanji, and found myself
often in the need of looking up a character. Except for the IME-Tool in Windows, no
available handwriting recognition engine really convinced me. For example OSX' built in
handwriting recognition only works for Chinese, so Hiragana, Katakana and
Kokuji (like 働, hataraku) don't work.
This is my attempt.
Japanese native speakers are much quicker by different means of input, so input by
handwriting recognition is not very popular in Japan. Especially lacking is a tool
for Android. The long-time goal is therefore to develop a virtual keyboard for Android.