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100%. My sense is that many in this thread have never gone through the misery of trying to use classical OCR for non-English documents or where you can't control scan quality. I did a test recently with 18th-century German documents, written in a well-known and standardized but archaic script. The accuracy of classical models specifically trained on this corpus was an order of magnitude lower than GPT5. I haven't experimented personally or professionally with smaller models, but your experience makes me hopeful that we might even get this accurate OCR on phones sooner rather than later...


William Mattingly has been doing a lot of work on similar documents in an archival context with VLLMs. You should check in on their work:

https://x.com/wjb_mattingly

https://github.com/wjbmattingly




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