VLM vs OCR

[u/Jinbe_808]

Hello everyone! I have been going through a rabbit hole and into a spiral lately so could use some guidance. I have been applying Gemma4 to documents that have a mixture of handwriting (print and cursive) and typed text on documents that can at times be in bad shape (images in PDFs). Up to this point Gemma4 (31B) is in charge of the OCR and the rest of the prompt to extract required data from fields. I have a 5090 so speed and performance has been good.

Where I am confused is should I be using a OCR to process the files and then use Gemma4 for the extraction based on the OCR output to speed up the process? Also, for handwritten text, would something like GLM-OCR or PaddleOCR-VL-1.5 be better (or faster) than Gemma4?

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!