I've been exploring an idea and ran a small test I thought this sub would appreciate. I took 5 pages that exist only as images (no text layer): two handwritten exam papers, a two-column journal article, a contract with a fee table, and a tilted/blurred version of one exam paper. Then I asked two of the most popular AI PDF assistants 6 questions per page, scored against what's visibly on the page (12 points per page). Results: - Assistant A rejected all five files outright — "scanned / image-only PDFs are not supported." 0 across the board. - Assistant B was honestly great on clean print (10–12/12, even nailed a multi-step fee calculation). But every single handwritten answer came back "Not in document", teacher's marks were invisible to it, and the degraded scan failed to process entirely (0/12). - The answers were all there — readable directly from the images (12/12 on the clean pages, 8/12 even on the degraded one). The gap seems structural: one tool reads only the PDF text layer; the other's OCR discards handwriting before the AI sees the page. I'm building a small tool (VersoDoc) aimed exactly at this: clean up the scan first, then read print + handwriting + marks together. Not launched yet — there's a waitlist and the full test write-up here: https://versodoc.com/ai-pdf-tools-scan-test Curious whether others hit this wall too — what do you currently do with scanned documents?   submitted by   /u/Paulwxw [link]   [comments]