Document OCR

A document reader turns a scanned page, a photo of a document or a whole PDF into clean text. These are specialists rather than chat models: they read pages, and they do not reason at length about them.

The Models

Unlimited-OCR is the general document reader: structured parsing with the position of every block, whole-PDF runs, and a figure pass. PaddleOCR-VL 1.6 is the compact page reader, with strong coverage of Nordic and other European languages and specialist modes for tables, formulas, charts and seals.

Both keep working memory for the image reader on top of their weights, about 1 GB and 1.9 GB respectively, and the Studio's fit chart counts it rather than leaving you to discover it at load time.

Reading Modes

A document is not one job. Asking for plain text and asking for a table's structure are different decodes, so the mode is part of the request rather than something you phrase in a prompt and hope for.

Asking For A Mode

Add an ocr object to a chat request. It travels alongside the image or document content part in the ordinary way.

{
  "model": "paddleocr-vl-1.6",
  "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": [ ... image or file part ... ] }],
  "ocr": { "mode": "table" }
}

On Unlimited-OCR the object also takes crop, which chooses how the page is cut up before reading: auto decides from the request, gundam is a tiled close-up pass that reads fine print well, and base is a faster whole-page pass that suits long documents. PaddleOCR-VL takes mode and nothing else, and says so: sending a field its interface does not have is refused rather than accepted and ignored, because silently accepting one would advertise behaviour that does not exist.

An invalid mode comes back as a 400 naming every mode that model does accept, so the vocabulary is discoverable without reading this page.

Finding Out What An Endpoint Offers

Modes differ per model, so they are advertised rather than assumed. GET /v1/models and the manager's /api/server both report an ocr object for a served document reader:

"ocr": { "modes": ["ocr", "table", "formula", "chart", "spotting", "seal"],
          "crops": [], "grounding": false }

A client builds its controls from that, which is how the Studio offers exactly the modes the loaded model has and never a mode it does not. A model that is not a document reader has no ocr object at all.

The same listing carries document_parser: true for these models, and clients should act on it: a request with no document is refused with a 400. These models read pages, so a text-only chat has nothing to work on and says so instead of answering from nowhere. A client that offers a chat box against one of them should require an attachment before it lets you send, which is what the Studio's composer does.

Grounded Regions

Unlimited-OCR can point at where on the page each piece of text came from. When grounding is advertised, the response carries an ocr.regions extension: boxes as [x1, y1, x2, y2] normalised to a 0 to 999 grid, so they map onto the page at any rendered size without you having to know the resolution it was read at.

The association between a box and its text is kept rather than flattened, which is the difference between "here is the text and here are some boxes" and being able to click a line and see where it came from. In the Studio the boxes appear on the page as the answer streams.

Whole PDFs

A PDF is rendered to pages and fed through the reader for you. The page range you choose bounds the work: a 400-page document reads only the pages you asked for, rather than rendering the lot and discarding most of it. The cap is stated rather than silently applied.

For how attachments reach a model in the first place, including the text-extraction route that any model can use, see Documents and Images.