Do I need an OCR API that gives coordinates and bounding boxes?

It depends on what you want to do with the text after OCR.

You likely do need coordinates / bounding boxes if you need to:

• Highlight text on the original image or PDF
• Link extracted text back to its location in a document viewer
• Parse forms, invoices, receipts, tables, or layouts
• Detect lines, words, or paragraphs in position order
• Redact specific text on the page
• Do document QA or annotation where location matters

You likely don’t need them if you only want:

• Plain text extraction
• Searchable text for indexing
• Basic transcription of scanned documents
• A quick “what does this say?” result

Rule of thumb

• If your app is just “OCR to text,” a simple OCR API is usually enough.
• If your app needs to understand where text is on the page, choose an API that returns bounding boxes, polygons, or coordinates.

What to look for in an OCR API

Useful output features:

• Word-level and line-level coordinates
• Confidence scores
• Reading order
• Page segmentation
• Table/form structure
• Orientation/rotation detection

If you tell me your use case, I can tell you whether you need coordinates and what kind of OCR output to look for.