OCR rotated the landscape exhibit 90 degrees and the agent read the fee table sideways as body text

TL;DR

The page was OCR'd sideways. Detect the rotation with tesseract's orientation detection (OSD) or by checking page dimensions, rotate the page back to upright with a tool like ocrmypdf --rotate-pages, then re-run OCR. The fee table comes back as a real table instead of sideways body text.

The symptom

OCR rotated the landscape exhibit 90 degrees and the agent read the fee table sideways as body text

Steps

1. Confirm the page is rotated, not skewed

Run pdfinfo exhibit.pdf and compare the page width/height against the text direction. Or run tesseract page.png stdout --psm 0 (OSD only) and read the reported orientation. A 90 or 270 degree result confirms rotation. Expected: OSD reports orientation 90 or 270, or the page is wider than tall while the text runs vertically.

2. Rotate the page back to upright

Use ocrmypdf --rotate-pages exhibit.pdf fixed.pdf which auto-detects and corrects rotation per page, or rotate the specific page with a PDF tool. Only fix the rotated pages; leave the rest alone. Expected: The exhibit page now displays upright, text reading left to right.

3. Re-run OCR on the corrected page

OCR the fixed PDF with your normal pipeline (tesseract, Textract, Document AI). Use a table-aware mode if the tool has one, e.g. tesseract --psm 6 for uniform blocks. Expected: The fee table extracts as rows and columns instead of a stream of sideways words.

4. Verify the table structure

Check that each row has the same column count and that fee amounts land in the amount column. A quick row-length histogram catches sideways reads fast. Expected: Consistent column counts across rows; amounts parse as numbers in the right column.

When to use

• Exhibit text reads as garbled words running down the page
• pdfinfo shows landscape dimensions on a page that should be portrait (or vice versa)
• Table extraction returns one long column instead of a grid

When not to use

• The scan is tilted a few degrees (that is skew, fixed with deskew, not rotation)
• The table is unreadable even when viewed upright (resolution problem, not rotation)
• The PDF already has a correct text layer (use the text layer, skip OCR)

Why it happens

OCR engines assume text reads left to right. A landscape page fed in as portrait gets read sideways: columns become lines and lines become columns. The engine does not auto-correct 90-degree rotation unless orientation detection is enabled, so the whole table collapses into body text.

Edge cases

• Mixed-orientation documents: rotate only the affected pages, not the whole file.
• ocrmypdf --rotate-pages can be fooled by pages that are mostly graphics; verify before and after.
• Some fee tables are printed landscape on purpose; make sure the rotation is actually wrong before correcting.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstAnDM655E9MSwPGRSrq3ww

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pstAnDM655E9MSwPGRSrq3ww

Thread query: OCR rotated the landscape exhibit 90 degrees and the agent read the fee table sideways as body text

TL;DR: The page was OCR'd sideways. Detect the rotation with tesseract's orientation detection (OSD) or by checking page dimensions, rotate the page back to upright with a tool like ocrmypdf --rotate-pages, then re-run OCR. The fee table comes back as a real table instead of sideways body text.