I keep running into the same problem with OCR.
If the file is clean and straight, most tools do an okay job. But the second it’s a messy scan, faded text, a slightly crooked page, or one of those PDFs with tables and random stamps on it, the result gets weird fast. Numbers turn into letters, lines break in the wrong places, and suddenly a simple document looks like it was translated by a haunted toaster.
That’s the part that keeps annoying me. A lot of PDF tools are fine for basic stuff, but OCR still feels way less reliable than it should be once the file isn’t perfect.
I’ve had this happen with invoices, forms, and scanned worksheets, and it always turns a 2-minute task into a dumb little side quest.
How are you dealing with this? Do you have a tool that handles messy scans better, or do you just clean the file first and hope for the best?