Layout analysis
Also: Layout assessment
The step before OCR that identifies and labels regions on a page image — text blocks, headers, footnotes, figures, tables, marginalia.
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Layout analysis is the step before OCR. Given a page image, identify and label its regions — text blocks, headers, footnotes, figures, tables, marginalia. Without it, OCR pours every character into one flat stream and loses all structure.
Why it matters for your research. Primary-source pages are rarely one rectangle of text. A 17th-century broadsheet is three columns with wood-cut borders; an academic monograph has footnotes anchored to specific lines. Preserving the region kinds in your bundle is what lets you filter, facet, and cite correctly later.
In Archēglyph. Done by a VLM. Each region is tagged with its kind and the model id that made the call. See the pipeline guide.
Not to be confused with. OCR reads text inside regions. Layout analysis decides where the regions are and what they are.