The ImageGear Recognition component supports recognition of four Asian languages with horizontal or vertical text direction: Japanese, Korean, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. It can handle short embedded texts in English.

Support for Asian languages requires the IG_REC_FEATURE_ASIAN licensing feature to be enabled.

The Asian language handling differs somewhat from that for Western languages. Spell checking, editor display, and verification are not available for Asian languages. Only one Asian language should be set for recognition, and Western languages should not be set alongside an Asian language. However, the Asian OCR Engine can recognize short English texts embedded in Asian text without English needing to be set. If embedded texts are in other Latin-alphabet languages, these similarly do not need to be set; however, accented characters may not always be handled correctly.

For the Asian recognition module to work properly, the selected Asian language should be set before the preprocess operation.

Asian text can be horizontal and left-to-right (IG_REC_WT_FLOW) or vertical - character flow top-to-bottom with line flow from right-to-left (IG_REC_WT_VERTTEXT).

Texts embedded in vertical texts can have three orientations: vertical (neon), right-rotated, and side-by-side. The latter is usually limited to three characters, and is most often used for Arabic numerals. The output converters transform all such embedded texts to right rotation.