I have a flow where i extract text from a pdf with pdf-parse and then feed that to an ai for data extraction. If that fails i convert it to a png and send the image for data extraction. This works very well and would presumably be far cheaper as i'm generally sending text to the model instead of relying on images. Isn't just sending the images for ocr significantly more expensive?
There was an interesting discussion on here a couple of months back about images vs text, driven by this article: https://www.seangoedecke.com/text-tokens-as-image-tokens/
Discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652952
By definition, OCR means optical character recognition. It depends on the contents of the PDF what kind of extraction methodology can work. Often some available PDFs are just scans of printed documents or handwritten notes. If machine readable text is available your approach is great.
I always render an image and OCR that so I don’t get odd problems from invisible text and it also avoids being affected by anything for SEO.