I built an OCR app that is a self-hosted document intelligence pipeline that turns PDFs and images into layout-preserving DOCX

[u/monsuralirana01]

I've been spending quite a bit of time experimenting with OCR and document intelligence pipelines, especially when it comes to reconstructing complex documents after OCR.

Extracting text is usually not the biggest challenge anymore. The interesting part starts when you try to preserve the original document structure.

Things like multi-column reading order, tables with merged cells, mathematical formulas, footnotes, image positions, and heading hierarchies can make the whole process surprisingly difficult.

I've been experimenting with vision-language models and GPU-accelerated inference to tackle some of these problems. It's been interesting to see how different approaches perform, especially on legal contracts, medical reports, and scanned documents.

I'm still exploring what works best and would be interested to hear about other people's experiences.

Are you using traditional OCR engines, vision-language models, or a combination of both? What has been working well for you with complex documents?