Abstract
OCR post-processing needs OCR text aligned word by word with its ground truth.
Data sets rarely provide that mapping, and a monotone aligner can lose its place when zoning errors permute the reading order.
We revisit this problem, the Zoning Problem of our 2019 paper, with a protocol that tests correctness under such permutations.
We apply OCR-side reading-order permutations with construction-time word-level gold and score correct-match F1, cascade length and recovery.
We compare the 2019 location-aware aligner, a re-anchoring extension of it, a RETAS-style baseline (RETAS-lite), a multi-region aligner that combines unique-word and unique n-gram anchors with chunk-to-window assignment, genalog's RETAS and the original Java RETAS.
Experiments use synthetic character noise with block moves, paragraph swaps and column interleaving, historical newspaper reading-order permutations, geometry-derived gold for Tesseract OCR, and a small word-box set.
Synthetic tests show where local tracking fails after large displacements and where unique-anchor methods collapse when unique anchors are scarce.
On our synthetic boilerplate page the 2019 method had the highest F1 among those tested.
Historical newspaper and geometry-derived evaluations carry the limitations of approximate gold and the article-order convention.
The first multi-region version has a quadratic scaling cost.
Local tracking remains fragile under large reading-order changes; the tested anchor-based methods handle many of those cases but fail when unique anchors are scarce.
Approximate gold, the article-order convention, missing residual annotation, and the lack of modern multi-column word-level ground truth remain limitations.