Run structured extraction on documents/images locally with Ollama and Pydantic

I've used "structured output" (with supplied schema) on Google and openai, and function calling / tool use on those, anthropic and others- and afaict they are functionally the same (if you force a specific function / schema). Has someone had a different experience?

They’re slightly nuanced - every model provider has a slightly different Pydantic /JSON schema compatibility (i.e for handling Literals, Unions, nested subtypes etc).

So you end up hitting roadblocks for seemingly simple Pydantic schemas.

I meant between "structured output" and "function calling". Afaict one is outputting according to a schema and the other is outputting according to a schema... which will be used as the parameters to a function.

But they seem to be considered disparate concepts. So I'm trying to understand if there's some additional nuance I'm missing.

With function calls the model may or may not output something that matches the schema, with structured output the schema is enforced at the logit level.