> My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point.
Not really in practice to me. Especially they still struggle with Table format detection.
Not really in practice to me. Especially they still struggle with Table format detection.
Any complex parent table span cell relationship still has low accuracy.
Try the reverse, take a complex picture table and ask Chatgpt5, claude Opus 3.1, Gemini Pro 2.5 to produce a HTML table.
They will fail.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68f5f9ba-d448-8005-86d2-c3fbae028b...
Edit: Just caught a mistake, transcribed one of the prices incorrectly.
Just get a DEF 14A (Annual meeting) filing of a company from SEC EDGAR.
I have seen so many mistakes when looking at the result closely.
Here is a DEF 14A filing from Salseforce. You can print it to a PDF and then try converting.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1108524/000110852425...
As mentioned above I have about 200 construction invoices. They are all formatted in a way that doesn't make sense. Most fail both OCR and OpenAI
Spreadsheets are not the biggest problem though, as they have a reliable 2-dimensional grid - at worst some cells will be combined. The form layouts and n-dimensional table structures you can find on medical and insurance documents are truly unhinged. I've seen documents that I struggled to interpret.
(I imagine it also had the benefit of reducing fraud/errors).
In this day and age, it's probably easier/better to change the process around that as there's little excuse for such shit quality input. I understand this isn't always possible though.
It's a hard (and very interesting) problem space.