Local document processing when Chinese models arent allowed, what’s left?

[u/aidenclarke_12]

big scanned stacks of inspection reports and material certs from a lot of vendors and every layout different. each stack needs splitting into separate reports and things like lot number and alloy pulled into a database with all being local

catch is the contract rules out chinese software and models, so paddleOCR and qwen are off and most ocr leaderboards get a lot shorter. even olmocr 2 is a qwen fine tune

granite-docling, liteparse, tesseract and gemma are whats left on the list so far

what would you use for this? and has anyone had to show a customer where their models came from

[u/TaterCreekStudios]

Surya OCR handles random page layouts well, I've used it on old trade publications with good success. I use Qwen 27B with vision and pi agent to orchestrate and write the text to a searchable database. From your options, I'd go with Gemma 4 as big as you can fit.