Reviewed documentation summaries for handwriting OCR capability, setup, and pricing via search. It looked viable for general text detection but was ruled out in favor of a reader with a clearer handwriting confidence and layout story for human review.
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Google Cloud Vision
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Evaluating OCR for handwritten job sheets
Reviewed docs and pricing for cloud OCR with handwriting support. Fast and deterministic with no hallucination, but output was raw text requiring another step to get structured part and quantity data, and remained brittle on dark cursive phone photos.
Comparing handwritten OCR options
Reviewed vision and document OCR pricing and credential model. Ruled out because it needed a new cloud project and service credentials for essentially the same per-page cost as the selected option.
Handwritten parts extraction from job sheet photos
Selected DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION with handwriting hint as assistive prefill for parts lines. Implemented pluggable extractor with lazy SDK import and NoOp fallback so photo and manual entry work without credentials. Cheapest managed pricing at this volume and fits no-GPU-ops constraint.
- What worked
- Handwriting-tuned mode, single REST call per sheet, clear pricing tiers and free tier, lazy import avoids hard dependency, easy to gate behind env var.
- What got in the way
- Pricing page required corroboration across secondary sources; auth setup requires enabling API and service account, not exercised live since fallback path was used locally.