Should have probably tried a more OCR specific model
But with Gemini the API the model does do the OCR resulting in much better accuracy.
Was this... not basically a solved problem like 30 years ago? I'm pretty sure the shareware OCR tool that came with a black and white scanner I had at one point would do better than 20% wrong.
Opus 4.8 scanned hundreds of PDFs for me recently with the worst handwriting imaginable. 100% successful, other than one record where even I could not figure out what was written.
That's not really productive lol, I'm glad it worked for you but these models are non-deterministic and 'YMMV' very much applies everywhere. I had it parse receipts (in fairness, in variable lightning), all taken from iPhone cameras in the past year. And yeah, not a great job, about 20% failed to get the date correct. (Not outrageously wrong, e.g 05/20/2026 becomes 05/23/2026.
YMMV, glad it worked for you.
I'm personally using the small Qwen 3.5 models. If you have an OCR problem, Mistral OCR 4 is probably great. Open weights models that you can run on a laptop may also work great.