State of non-English OCR in 2026

For english all works out basically fine either be local or cloud but disaster arrives when its non english, most often needs a VLM then while if youre on OCR, it fails depending on the script this is where it actually torn apart- Most of it because the ocr models are built around latin, left to right and once character at a time assumptions. whereas Arabic breaks that immediately like the letters change the shape by position and reading direction is right to left so without contextual letterform handling you get garbled output and mixing rtl and ltr scrambles the line order Indic scripts miss