Guides
Document Processing Guides
100+ hands-on guides covering the full document processing stack — OCR engines, LLM-based extraction, table parsing, pipeline architecture, and industry-specific automation. Written for developers, technical evaluators, and architects who need implementation detail, not marketing overviews.
Each guide covers real-world trade-offs, includes benchmark data where available, and links to relevant vendor profiles for commercial alternatives.
Getting Started
| Guide | Who It's For |
|---|---|
| OCR vs LLMs for Document Processing | Teams deciding between traditional OCR and LLM-based extraction |
| Open-Source OCR Engines Compared | Developers choosing between Tesseract, PaddleOCR, Surya, and EasyOCR |
| OCR API Comparison | Developers evaluating cloud OCR services (Azure, Google, AWS, ABBYY) |
| Tesseract OCR Guide | Developers getting started with the most widely-used open-source OCR engine |
| OCR Accuracy: Measuring and Improving Quality | Teams benchmarking and optimizing OCR output quality |
| Multi-Language OCR | Teams processing documents in multiple languages and scripts |
| Document Digitization | Organizations planning large-scale paper-to-digital conversion projects |
| Document Scanning Best Practices | Teams preparing physical documents for digitization and OCR |
| OCR for Developers | Developers integrating OCR into applications and pipelines |
| Document Conversion Tools | Teams converting between document formats (PDF, Word, images, HTML) |
| Apache Tika Guide | Java developers using Apache Tika for document content detection and extraction |
| Docling Guide | Developers using IBM's open-source document parser for structured extraction |
| Unstructured.io Guide | AI engineers using Unstructured for document ETL and RAG pipelines |
| Document Capture Solutions | Teams evaluating document capture hardware and software solutions |
| Document Indexing Automation | Teams automating document classification and metadata tagging |
| Intelligent Character Recognition | Teams processing handwritten and cursive text with ICR technology |
| PDF to Markdown Tools | Developers converting PDFs to clean markdown for RAG and LLM pipelines |
| Vision Language Models for OCR | Teams evaluating VLM-based OCR models like GOT-OCR, Qwen2-VL, and olmOCR |
| Image Preprocessing for OCR | Developers improving OCR accuracy with deskew, denoise, and binarization |
| Marker Guide | Developers using Marker for high-accuracy PDF to markdown conversion |
| LlamaParse Guide | Developers using LlamaParse for GenAI-native document parsing |
| Document Parsing Benchmarks | Teams benchmarking and comparing document parsing tools |
| AWS Textract Guide | Developers using Amazon Textract for cloud-based document extraction |
| Google Document AI Guide | Developers using Google Cloud Document AI for document processing |
| Azure Document Intelligence Guide | Developers using Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence |
| OCR Benchmarks | Teams evaluating OCR accuracy across engines, languages, and document types |
| Document Layout Analysis | Developers detecting document structure, regions, and reading order |
| OCR Post-Processing | Teams improving OCR output with error correction and confidence scoring |
| Document AI Model Evaluation | Teams benchmarking and comparing document processing model accuracy |
Data Extraction
| Guide | Who It's For |
|---|---|
| Extracting Tables from PDFs | Developers building table extraction pipelines |
| Python PDF Libraries Compared | Python developers choosing a PDF parsing library |
| Document Processing with Python | Python developers building end-to-end document pipelines |
| Handwriting Recognition Tools | Teams processing handwritten forms, medical records, and historical documents |
| Receipt OCR | Developers building receipt scanning and expense automation |
| ID Document OCR | Developers building passport, driver's license, and ID card scanning |
| Bank Statement Processing | Fintech teams automating financial document extraction |
| Form Recognition | Developers automating structured form data capture and extraction |
| PDF Data Extraction | Developers extracting structured data from PDF documents at scale |
| Email Document Extraction | Teams automating extraction from email attachments and inboxes |
| AI Data Extraction | Teams using AI/ML for intelligent data extraction from documents |
| Document Processing with Node.js | Node.js developers building document extraction pipelines |
| Document Processing with Java | Java developers building enterprise document extraction pipelines |
| PDF to Structured Data | Developers extracting tables, forms, and key-value pairs from PDFs into JSON/CSV |
| Document Processing with C# | .NET developers building document extraction pipelines |
| Document Processing with Go | Go developers building high-performance document processing |
| PDF Accessibility Guide | Teams making PDFs accessible and Section 508/WCAG compliant |
| Document Processing with Rust | Rust developers building high-performance document processing |
| Document Processing with React | Frontend developers building document upload, viewing, and extraction UIs |
| Document Processing with Angular | Angular developers building document processing UIs and pipelines |
Classification & Understanding
| Guide | Who It's For |
|---|---|
| Document Classification with ML | ML engineers building automated document routing and classification |
| Document Processing for RAG Pipelines | AI engineers building retrieval-augmented generation systems |
| Contract Analysis | Legal teams automating contract review and clause extraction |
| Document AI with LLMs | AI engineers using GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini for document understanding |
| AI Document Summarization | Teams using AI to summarize and extract insights from long documents |
| Structured vs Unstructured Data | Teams understanding document data types and processing approaches |
| Agentic Document Processing | AI engineers building LLM agent workflows for document extraction |
| Fine-Tuning Document Models | ML engineers fine-tuning LayoutLM, Donut, and custom VLMs for documents |
| Prompt Engineering for Document Extraction | Developers designing reliable prompts for structured data extraction |
| LangChain for Document Processing | Developers building LLM document pipelines with LangChain |
| OCR to LLM Migration Guide | Teams migrating from legacy OCR to modern LLM-based extraction |
| Document Classification with Transformers | ML engineers training BERT, LayoutLM, and Donut for document classification |
| Claude API for Document Processing | Developers using Claude's vision API for document extraction |
| Document Processing Performance Tuning | Teams optimizing latency, throughput, and cost of document pipelines |
Industry Solutions
| Guide | Who It's For |
|---|---|
| Medical Document Processing | Healthcare teams automating clinical records and HIPAA-compliant workflows |
| Invoice Processing Automation | Finance teams automating AP workflows with IDP |
| Accounts Payable Automation | Finance teams automating the full AP cycle from invoice receipt to payment |
| Insurance Claims Processing | Insurance teams automating claims intake, extraction, and adjudication |
| Mortgage Document Automation | Mortgage lenders automating loan document processing and compliance |
| Tax Document Processing | Accounting teams automating W-2, 1099, and tax form extraction |
| Purchase Order Processing | Procurement teams automating PO extraction and matching |
| Digital Mailroom | Enterprise teams automating inbound mail classification and routing |
| Logistics Document Processing | Supply chain teams automating BOL, customs, and freight documents |
| HR Document Processing | HR teams automating employee records, onboarding, and compliance docs |
| Real Estate Document Processing | Real estate teams automating title, closing, and property documents |
| Government Document Processing | Government agencies automating citizen services and records management |
| Legal Document Automation | Legal teams automating document assembly, review, and compliance |
| Supply Chain Document Automation | Supply chain teams automating procurement, shipping, and trade docs |
| Construction Document Management | Construction teams managing blueprints, permits, and project documents |
| Education Document Processing | Educational institutions automating student records and admissions |
| Freight Document Processing | Logistics teams automating BOL, customs, and shipping documents |
| Healthcare Claims Automation | Healthcare organizations automating claims processing and adjudication |
Compliance & Security
| Guide | Who It's For |
|---|---|
| Document Redaction | Compliance teams automating PII removal from documents |
| KYC Document Verification | Fintech and banking teams automating identity document verification |
| Document Verification | Teams automating document authenticity and fraud detection |
| Document Processing Compliance | Compliance teams ensuring regulatory document processing requirements |
Implementation & Strategy
| Guide | Who It's For |
|---|---|
| IDP Vendor Evaluation Guide | Procurement teams evaluating and selecting IDP software vendors |
| IDP Implementation Guide | Project leads planning intelligent document processing deployments |
| Self-Hosted Document Processing | Organizations needing on-premise document processing solutions |
| Batch Document Processing | Teams processing thousands of documents at scale with OCR and AI |
| Document Workflow Automation | Operations teams automating end-to-end document workflows |
| Automate Data Entry | Teams eliminating manual data entry with AI-powered automation |
| Document Management Best Practices | Organizations implementing document management systems and workflows |
| Document Data Validation | Teams implementing extraction quality assurance and validation rules |
| Document Automation ROI | Leaders building the business case for document processing automation |
| Document Archiving Solutions | Organizations implementing long-term document storage and retrieval |
| Document Processing Pipeline Architecture | Architects designing end-to-end document processing pipelines |
| Serverless Document Processing | Teams deploying document processing on AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and GCP |
| Document Processing Cost Optimization | Teams reducing IDP costs through architecture, batching, and vendor strategies |
| Document Processing Monitoring | Teams building observability for production document processing pipelines |
| Human-in-the-Loop Document Processing | Teams designing review workflows for AI-assisted document extraction |
| Document Processing Testing | Teams building test suites for document extraction pipelines |
| Document Processing Security | Teams securing document processing workflows and data pipelines |
| On-Premise Document Processing | Organizations deploying document processing on-premise for compliance and security |
| Real-Time Document Processing | Teams building low-latency document processing for streaming and event-driven architectures |
| Document Enrichment & Entity Resolution | Teams enriching extracted document data with entity linking and knowledge graphs |
| Building a Document Processing API | Developers designing REST/GraphQL APIs for document extraction services |
| Streaming Document Processing with Kafka | Teams building event-driven document processing with message queues |
Looking for a production-grade solution? Browse the vendor directory or use the Vendor Finder to match your requirements. For head-to-head competitive analysis, see Vendor Evaluations.