A system and computer-implemented method for calibrating a document processing device from a composite document is disclosed. A composite document including human-readable content and machine-readable code marks is input into a document processing device. The machine-readable code marks are decoded to identify at least one spatial pointer including at least one nominal property of at least a portion of the human-readable content. The at least one nominal property is compared to an input property of the human-readable content. One or more distortions in the input property compared to the at least one nominal property are identified. The document processing device is calibrated based on the identified distortions.