Despite newer architectures, DharmaOCR outperformed Mistral OCR4 and Unlimited-OCR on Brazilian Portuguese through domain specialization and targeted training. This article presents the evidence and the mechanism behind that advantage. Three months ago, we published a paper on DharmaOCR and open-sourced one of the models . The objective was specific: optical character recognition engineered for Brazilian Portuguese. The training pipeline was built in two stages. The first was a supervised fine-tuning step, drawing on a broad collection of Portuguese-language files from different sources, formats, and levels of complexity. …