Does a Chinese document parser actually work on Japanese PDFs? I measured it — and the answer is 'it depends on the font path'
A technical evaluation of RAGFlow's DeepDoc, an open-source document parser from China, revealed a critical flaw when processing Japanese PDFs. The parser systematically misreads the Japanese era name character 令 as 今 on scanned or form-font documents, which could corrupt dates on legal and financial records. However, this issue is specific to DeepDoc's OCR fallback path; digitally extracted text from embedded-font PDFs is unaffected. Despite the OCR error, DeepDoc's improved layout understanding led to a 15% increase in retrieval accuracy for lexical search systems on the tested documents. AI
IMPACT Highlights potential OCR issues in Chinese AI tooling for Japanese documents, impacting enterprise RAG systems that rely on accurate date parsing.