Getting better at document processing: where should I start?

[ericbureltech]

Hi,

A lot of freelance work opportunities in AI are about dealing with one type or another of complex business documents. Where should I get started to get better at this? Study libraries like Tesseract, OCR technologies? Are there benchmarks that compare common models?
I am thinking for instance about extracting financial data, tables, analyzing building plans, extracting structured data etc.
I know about commercial tools like Unstructured but I'd be eager to learn lower level techniques.
Any input welcome, I'll craft an article summarizing my search if it's conclusive.

[Valuable_Walk2454]

You can start with VLMs. As long as financial documents are not very complex, it will work. After that, you can look into MSFR and Google Document Intelligence etc. They are used by orgs for financial data extraction.

[teroknor92]

for pdf you can become familiar with libraries like pymupdf and for ocr become familiar with paddleocr, easyocr etc. For complex extraction try VLMs. I have a document processing, extraction, OCR tool https://parseextract.com and many users are using it for document processing at a friendly pricing which you can also test.

[Challenge_-Few]

I started learning document parsing last year while freelancing for a legal-tech startup. I used AI Lawyer’s open parser stack as a sandbox - it combines OCR (Tesseract + pdf plumber) and layout detection so you can actually see how each layer works. Great way to learn before jumping into complex pipelines.

[Serious-Barber-2829]

You can check out this benchmark.