Pain map
What breaks in document AI
290 production incidents from public threads. Every quote links to its source. Pick a category and check it yourself.
Arabic and right-to-left text
6 of 6 quotes
“I had a huge problem when it came to OCR initially because I work on multilingual documents”
Reddit, r/LangChain · 8 August 2026 · in production · open the thread “The text is primarily in English, Urdu, and Arabic. I’ve tried Tesseract, EasyOCR, and PaddleOC”
Reddit, r/Rag · 3 August 2026 · in production · open the thread “This produces thousands of spurious hash characters in the output, corrupting the Arabic text.”
GitHub, docling · 14 July 2026 · in production · open the thread “Converting PDFs containing both Arabic and English text, the generated .md output is inconsistent”
GitHub, docling · 17 May 2026 · open the thread “the extracted text appears in LTR (Left to Right) instead of the correct RTL (Right to Left) order used in Arabic. This results in scrambled text and unreadable chunks.”
GitHub, ragflow · 16 November 2025 · open the thread Hit this one too? We are building for it. Join the waitlist.
“Mistral Embed works well in English but not in French”
Hacker News · 5 November 2025 · in production · open the thread Hit this one too? We are building for it. Join the waitlist.
Method
We collected 448 public posts published after 1 November 2025 in which a builder describes document AI failing. Each link was re-opened on 8 November 2026. We kept the 290 where the quote is on the page, the author describes an incident and not an opinion, and has no tie to a vendor. Quotes are verbatim and trimmed after 420 characters. The grouping is ours. A complaint is not a measurement.