Japanese-Specialized OCR โ Manga, Vertical Text, Furigana, and Historical Documents
manga-ocr, Sarashina2.2-OCR, PaddleOCR, KuroNet โ every option for Japanese OCR
Why Japanese OCR Is Hard
Unlike English, Japanese has: vertical text (tategaki), furigana (small reading aids), 3 scripts mixed (hiragana + katakana + kanji), manga fonts, historical cursive (kuzushiji).
Tool Comparison
| Tool | Use Case | Vertical | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| manga-ocr | Manga | Yes | 400MB |
| Sarashina2.2-OCR | Documents (best) | Yes | 3B |
| PaddleOCR | General CJK | Yes | 10-150MB |
| KuroNet | Historical (kuzushiji) | Yes | Web API |
manga-ocr โ Manga Best
from manga_ocr import MangaOcr
mocr = MangaOcr()
text = mocr("speech_bubble.png") # โ "ใๅใฏใใๆญปใใงใใ"
Handles vertical/horizontal, furigana, various manga fonts, low-quality images.
KuroNet โ Historical Documents
The only production tool for pre-Meiji kuzushiji (cursive) โ modern Japanese conversion.
Key Concepts
manga-ocr (โ โโโโ) โ pip install + 2 lines. Best for manga text
Sarashina2.2-OCR (โ โ โ โโ) โ 3B model. Best Japanese document accuracy. GPU needed
PaddleOCR (โ โ โโโ) โ use_textline_orientation=True for vertical text auto-detection
KuroNet (โ โ โโโ) โ kuzushiji (historical) โ modern Japanese. Only tool