Prompt
Do I need structured OCR or is plain text enough?
Latest observation
Oct 11, 2026
OpenAI APIWeb search: off
It depends on what you want to do with the OCR output:
Plain text is enough if you only need:
- Searchable text
- Basic copy/paste
- Summaries or translation
- Simple NLP tasks like keyword extraction
Structured OCR is better if you need:
- Tables, columns, forms, invoices, or receipts
- Reading order preserved
- Field extraction like name, date, total, address
- Bounding boxes / layout info
- High accuracy for documents where position matters
Quick rule of thumb
- Use plain text for unstructured documents like letters, articles, notes.
- Use structured OCR for semi-structured or structured documents like forms, invoices, contracts, shipping labels, or scanned PDFs with multiple columns.
If you tell me what kind of documents you’re processing and what you want to do with them, I can recommend which one fits better.