But characters only exist when we ask the model about this and it does it best to do this projection if asked. Vision model are richer than that. It "understands" visually a document. If it was only about characters, then there will be no way it beats the traditional pipelines of image->text->extractions or obtain the kind of results we see in this article. Vision models are more than characters recognition and OCR term don't do it justice IMHO.