Fable
The copying academy first learned to read the positions on the paper
The copying office was responsible for entering external reports into the library. The literate craftsman could read the words, but did not understand which line was a title, which block was a table, or which image explained which paragraph.
The early approach was to copy the page from top to bottom into a string of text. A two-column report was copied as left-right interleaving, the footer was mixed into the body, and table cells scattered into fragments. An insurance policy was especially troublesome. The left column stated conditions, the right column stated exceptions, and the small print at the bottom added the effective date. Once strung into one line, the meaning looked like shredded cloth.
The director first added many rules: large text is a heading, low position is a footer, inside a frame is a table. As soon as different templates arrived, the rules fell apart.
Employees then manually annotated key pages. But shop names, contracts, manuals, and old scanned layouts all differed, and manual work quickly fell behind. More and more rules were added, and the walls of the office were covered with mnemonics. When encountering old paper with watermarks, receipts photographed at an angle, or cross-column footnotes, the scribes still had to guess by feel.
Later the copying academy brought in a typesetter. It first looked at the overall page layout, distinguished headings, paragraphs, tables, images, headers and footers, lists and reading order, and then had the literate craftsmen copy block by block.
With these regions, later segmentation is no longer blind. Headings can carry their subordinate paragraphs, tables can be preserved as a whole, and image captions can be tied to their images. The first time they brought in a layout specialist, everyone only had it draw boxes. They soon discovered that drawing regions was not enough; they also needed to know who reads first, who belongs to whom, and which cells are connected horizontally.
When the questioner checks the basis, they can see which page and which region the answer came from, rather than a jumble of misspelled text. The typesetter and the literate craftsman also had to cooperate. If the region is marked wrong, even accurate text will be wrong; if the text is read wrong, even a clear region is useless. The copying house later verified both results together, avoiding praise for only one skill.
The director still had to check complex layouts. Cross-page tables, rotated old scrolls, mixed scripts and blurry images all made the typesetter err. He finally understood that reading a document is not just recognizing characters, but understanding how characters relate to each other by position on the page.