Parse Scanned PDFs for RAG with EasyOCR: Free OCR Gives You Words, Not a Document

Traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools like EasyOCR are necessary but insufficient for building robust enterprise Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. While they successfully recover text from scanned documents, they fail to capture the surrounding document structure, such as section headings, tables, figures, or reading order. This creates a "layout gap," resulting in a flat string of text that is difficult for downstream AI processes to interpret contextually. The content contrasts this approach with layout-aware engines like Docling, which parse both text and structure, yielding a more useful output for advanced RAG applications.