I've been testing various document AI tools for our finance team, specifically to digitize old vendor invoices and handwritten equipment logs. A lot of our archives are scanned PDFs from the pre-digital era.
My core question: Can ChatPDF reliably extract text from *handwriting* in these scans? I'm not talking about perfect cursive, but typical printed-block handwriting on forms. Most SaaS tools in this space are very good with typed text via OCR, but handwriting is a whole different cost and accuracy challenge.
I'm looking for concrete experience on:
* What's the actual success rate? Does it return garbled characters, or does it attempt to interpret the handwriting?
* Does it differentiate between typed form fields and handwritten entries, or does it just process the whole page as one image?
* If it fails, does it just return blank text for those sections, or does it provide some kind of confidence score?
I'm trying to avoid a scenario where we subscribe based on marketing claims, only to find we need a far more expensive "handwriting-specific" API (like Google's Document AI) for the bulk of our actual task. Any data points on this specific use case would help my internal cost-benefit spreadsheet.