I did the opposite. Tesseract to get bboxes, words, and chars and then mistral on the clips with some reasonable reflow to preserve geometry. Paddle wasn’t working on my local machine (until I found RapidOCR). Surya was also very good but because you can’t really tweak any knobs, when it failed it just kinda failed. But Surya > Rapid w/ Paddle > DocTr > Tesseract while the latter gave me the most granularity when I needed it.

Edit: Gemini 2.0 was good enough for VLM cleanup, and now 2.5 or above with structured output make reconstruction even easier.