Three-Tier OCR Strategy: From Printed Documents to Handwritten Archives

While modern OCR tools like Tesseract excel at typed documents, they fail on handwritten text and degraded archives—a critical gap for legal and financial documents where extraction errors have real consequences. This production-proven three-tier architecture combines different tools by document type: Tesseract for modern prints, Mistral Pixtral's vision model for handwritten and historical documents, and specialized processing for complex layouts. The approach reveals that intelligent document processing isn't about a single powerful model, but matching the right tool to each document's characteristics.