Selection guide / editorial
Choose OCR for Python
Start with the output your application consumes, then test complete pipelines on representative files.
Text only
Keep a conventional OCR baseline alongside a document pipeline. Preserve line breaks and confidence where available; measure character errors on your actual language and scan quality.
PDFs and layout
Try a document converter such as Docling or the PaddleOCR document pipeline when reading order, tables and export structure matter. Inspect both the source page and exported document.
Compare fairly
Pin library and model revisions. Use identical page rendering, hardware and batch budgets. Record failures and end-to-end pages per second, including preprocessing.
Decide
Choose using acceptable error rates and review effort on your own hold-out documents. Historical public benchmark observations can provide candidates, not a guaranteed winner.
A minimal document conversion
Illustrative Docling integration, following its upstream quickstart; this snippet is not a benchmark run.
from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter
result = DocumentConverter().convert("sample.pdf")
markdown = result.document.export_to_markdown()
print(markdown)