Krux
May 20, 2026
PaddleOCR Now Runs Inside Hugging Face Transformers
Published: May 20, 2026 at 12:13 AM
Updated: May 20, 2026 at 12:13 AM
100-word summary
PaddleOCR 3.5 lets you pull text from PDFs and images using Hugging Face's Transformers library, not just PaddleOCR's own engine. Set engine="transformers" and the OCR models run through the same interface you already use for language models. The catch? It's slower than PaddleOCR's native backend in most cases. But for teams already building around Transformers, it means one less dependency to wrangle. You can now pipe scanned receipts, contracts, or invoices straight into your RAG setup without switching libraries halfway through. The integration comes with a live demo on Hugging Face Spaces and works with any recent PyTorch build, though you'll need to tune device settings and attention types yourself.
What happened
PaddleOCR 3.5 lets you pull text from PDFs and images using Hugging Face's Transformers library, not just PaddleOCR's own engine. Set engine="transformers" and the OCR models run through the same interface you already use for language models. The catch? It's slower than PaddleOCR's native backend in most cases. But for teams already building around Transformers, it means one less dependency to wrangle. You can now pipe scanned receipts, contracts, or invoices straight into your RAG setup without switching libraries halfway through.
Why it matters
The integration comes with a live demo on Hugging Face Spaces and works with any recent PyTorch build, though you'll need to tune device settings and attention types yourself.