We created a digital archive of about 80 years worth of magazine issues that were in all sorts of formats. The ocr worked pretty well in most cases, but we fou

We created a digital archive of about 80 years worth of magazine issues that were in all sorts of formats. The ocr worked pretty well in most cases, but we found that the older stuff worked better due there being limited typography and simpler layouts 80 years ago. The more modern issues were only available in PDF and were the biggest challenge, but the ocr still did a reasonably good job, even with the complex layouts and fonts. The tricky bit was preserving the flow of the document i.e. where to go when a column ends.