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 better, and what modern document processing systems actually require to work reliably in real environments. The Real Problem: OCR Fails on Tables, Layouts, and Context Consider a simple invoice: Item Qty Price Widget A 2 100 Widget B 1 200 Total: 400 Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode A naive OCR output may look like: Item Qty Price Widget A 2 100 Widget B 1 200 Total 400 Text is present. Structure is gone.…