Amazon Textract is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to automatically extract text, handwriting, layout elements and data from scanned documents. Textract goes beyond traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology b...

Markdown supported · ⌘↵ to post
Vaibhav Srivastava
A useful implementation detail to add after extraction: Textract's blocks describe geometry and relationships, but they do not automatically become a stable editable document. For multi-column pages, sort LINE blocks within detected layout regions instead of globally by Y coordinate, or copied text can interleave columns. For tables, follow CHILD relationships into CELL blocks and preserve row/column spans before exporting; flattening everything into strings loses the structure users expect in Word or Excel. I also recommend storing confidence beside every critical field and routing low-confidence names, dates, totals, and handwriting for review rather than silently accepting them. A successful API response proves extraction completed, not that the result is correct.