How to OCR Documents with Qwen 3.5 Series Models
The author used the open-source multimodal Qwen 3.5 series models for PDF OCR: first exporting each page as an image at 100 dpi with PyMuPDF, then feeding the images to the model for recognition. In testing, Qwen3.5-9B hit the sweet spot between quality and speed, while the smaller 0.8B to 2B models tended to go off track on complex documents, summarizing the content instead of transcribing it.
Why it matters: The author tested Qwen 3.5 models of various sizes for PDF OCR, and shares two reusable paths—local and via OpenRouter—along with cost data.