Why OCR Alone Fails in Real-World Documents

OCR works well in demos. Clean PDFs, structured layouts, predictable formats. In production, the story changes. An invoice arrives with a shifted table. A scanned contract has noise and skew. A bank statement uses multi-column layouts. OCR extracts text, but fields get misplaced, totals break, and relationships disappear. Teams step in to fix outputs manually. This slows workflows and introduces risk. This article breaks down where OCR fails, why layout-aware and context-aware models perform bet