The test applet below recognises kanji that you draw with the mouse or other input device. You can draw any kanji (6,000+ supported). Hiragana, katakana, and Latin characters are not supported.
Click and drag in the large left-hand box to draw kanji.
You don't have to use the whole box. Draw it any size you like.
This is only a test applet, so the interface is a bit weird. There are four different recognising algorithms, shown in four columns:
Exact match - you must get the stroke count exactly right and the stroke order exactly right. Stroke direction is also important.
Fuzzy match - you still must get the stroke count exactly right, but the stroke order is ignored. (Try drawing
±1 stroke - same as fuzzy match, but looks for characters with either 1 more stroke, or 1 fewer stroke, than you drew.
±2 strokes - same as fuzzy match, but looks for characters with either 2 more strokes, or 2 fewer strokes, than you drew.
The exact match algorithm performs best; you'll notice it updating first as you draw. Talking about performance, if you see very slow updates, this is likely a problem with your browser: try using a different one.
The algorithms do not work by 'looking' at the kanji you drew, so don't be surprised that most of the suggestions look totally different.
If the kanji you drew is shown, you can click on it to add it into the text box below. This can then be copy/pasted into other programs by selecting the text and using the normal keyboard shortcuts.
This program reports back to the leafdigital server every time you click on a kanji so that we can build statistical information about how the algorithms perform.
This recogniser is intended primarily to assist non-native Japanese speakers in looking up kanji in a dictionary, and is not a very good handwriting recogniser. For best results, draw kanji in the 'standard' way they would appear when printed.
Selected kanji:
Requires Java 6+. To check which Java version you're running, use this test site.
Uses database derived from the SVG kanji stroke order images produced by the KanjiVG project and released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
This is the example applet for the leafdigital kanjirecog Java library. (Link goes to source repository.)