OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it • Hacker News Board

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#11

Post by wcisco17 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

achillesheels wrote: post #4

Love it! Starbucks Vente Machiato sip Love to give it to an arc client, not sure who the right person to implement this would be? Hmm…

Hey OP here - Love to help if you're looking for a team to implement a solution.

https://cal.com/anchorgrid/anchorgrid-external-meeting?durat...

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#12

Post by alexeischiopu » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

Iulioh wrote: post #6

When will this be available for 30000x8000px electrical diagrams? I have to make a BOM and oh boy I hate my job

I’m building a similar platform, with electrical being furthest ahead - SLD, panels, lights, power, comms.

Also do doors, windows, and mechanical equipment.

dm, and I can include you in the next preview.

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#13

Post by alexeischiopu » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

Good idea :)

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#14

Post by vessenes » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

cool. What's pricing like?

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#15

Post by Terr_ » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

> OCR for construction documents does not work

I'm reminded of the Xerox JBIG2 bug back in ~2013, where certain scan settings could silently replace numbers inside documents, and bad construction-plans were one of the cases that led to it being discovered. [0]

It wasn't overt OCR per se, end-user users weren't intending to convert pixels to characters or vice-versa.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0O6UXrOZJo&t=6m03s

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#16

Post by wcisco17 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

vessenes wrote: post #14

cool. What's pricing like?

Thanks! https://www.getanchorgrid.com/developer/pricing

Let me know if you find it useful or have any questions, happy to help.

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#17

Post by wcisco17 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

alexeischiopu wrote: post #13

Good idea :)

Thanks!!

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#18

Post by testUser1228 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

What do you foresee being the end use case for this (or most valuable use case)?

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#19

Post by ranger_danger » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

pwagland wrote: post #9

kube-system wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when is tamper resistance a part of PDF or any common image format?

PDF files can be signed, that is tamper resistance. Tamper resistance doesn't have to make any difference to the readability of the document.

Can't one just remove the signature and re-sign it with anything else after tampering? Who verifies PDFs that hard?

Re: OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it

#20

Post by ranger_danger » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #10

pwagland wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF files can be signed, that is tamper resistance. Tamper resistance doesn't have to make any difference to the readability of the document.

So can any type of file -- that doesn't have any relevance to the supposed design of every file type in existence. Now, later versions of PDF do have explicit support for signatures, but what does this have to do with preventing OCR? OCR reads a file, it doesn't change the original file.

Some OCR solutions do change the original file, like OCRmyPDF. They take layers that were just images before and replace it with text layers so that you can search the document.