OCR Text Recognition
Characters on a scanned page have to be read correctly before any model can reason about them. Layout analysis, multilingual recognition, structured PDF output, and where PaddleOCR and HunyuanOCR part ways are the core concerns.
OCR is no longer just about recognizing characters: the layout engine has to locate titles and table boundaries, two-column pages need a reading order, and one misstep makes downstream QA stitch footnotes into confident-sounding nonsense. PaddleOCR's PP-StructureV3 handles layout and tables, HunyuanOCR covers street scenes and handwriting with about a billion parameters, and DeepSeek-OCR compresses a full page into visual tokens to save context.
