##Drawing characters by hand

**TL;DR**: We can obtain plaintext by manually drawing characters one-by-one using various software.

###Drawing on your phone

If your phone has Chinese input installed, you likely can already do this.  E.g., here I'm entering in my name into Pleco:

<img src="https://i.postimg.cc/L4V5wsHK/839953035.jpg">

### [MDBG Online Dictionary][1]

MDBG will accept hand drawn characters, but it does care about stroke order. Click on the "brush" icon next to the search box:

[![mdbg.net stroke input][2]][2]



###Random websites

If you Google `draw characters chinese` there's lots of software in which you can draw characters by hand.  It'll change over time, and there's sometimes browser issues, etc.  So one random example is [qhanzi.com][3]:

<img src="https://i.postimg.cc/ZRcpKxh4/Screenshot-2019-12-16-Handwritten-Chinese-input.png">

###Google Translate

I believe it's possible to do something similar with [Google Translate][4] by clicking this icon:

<img src="https://i.postimg.cc/MKXPNvyv/Screenshot-2019-12-16-Google-Translate-1.png">

But I can't get it to work properly, likely because it uses some Google feature that's blocked in China.


  [1]: https://www.mdbg.net/
  [2]: https://i.sstatic.net/vDwCy.png
  [3]: https://www.qhanzi.com/
  [4]: https://translate.google.cn/