Is there something like this for handwritten documents? I know newer models have been really good at handwriting transcription.

The API is pretty nice and easy to get started, but I couldn't get good results with parsing scientific paper PDFs, unfortunately (including OCR). Are there plans to use other backends? Docling works alright, and LLMs like Gemini Flash are interesting too.

in that case, what’s the deal with extract_bytes being async? i’m not incredibly familiar with python, but i’d expect a “byte string” to be in memory.

> It just litters perfectly reasonable python code with async/await

Yeah. As an API consumer I would not expect a PDF API do IO, hence be async. Have the library be sans-io, the interfaces sync and callers from async code handle IO on their end, offloading to IO threads.

Async is also referred to as “best practice”, but it’s just a tool, for specific use cases. And I say that as an “async fan”!

That said, perhaps it’s easier nowadays to just do async by default, as you say. The real world is async anyway, so why not program closer to that reality.

An oldy but goody for layout extraction is Cermine by Dominika Tkaczyk and colleagues[0]. Java required.

[0]: http://cermine.ceon.pl/about.html

Any experience with Paddle OCR? https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

Personally I‘ve used Tesseract before but the results were underwhelming, so I‘m curious how Paddle OCR performs in comparison.