[kergonath]

Tesseract does not understand layout. It’s fine for character recognition, but if I still have to pipe the output to a LLM to make sense of the layout and fix common transcription errors, I might as well use a single model. It’s also easier for a visual LLM to extract figures and tables in one pass.

[chaps]

For my workflows, layout extraction has been so inconsistent that I've stopped attempting to use it. It's simpler to just throw everything into postgis and run intersection checks on size-normalized pages.

[kergonath]

Interesting. What kind of layout do you have?

My documents have one or two-column layouts, often inconsistently across pages or even within a page (which tripped older layout detection methods). Most models seem to understand that well enough so they are good enough for my use case.

[fudged71]

I don't know how, but PyMuPDF4LLM is based on Tessaract and has GNN-based layout detection