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91 lines
3.5 KiB
ReStructuredText
91 lines
3.5 KiB
ReStructuredText
Paperless
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#########
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|Documentation|
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Scan, index, and archive all of your paper documents
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I hate paper. Environmental issues aside, it's a tech person's nightmare:
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* There's no search feature
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* It takes up physical space
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* Backups mean more paper
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In the past few months I've been bitten more than a few times by the problem
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of not having the right document around. Sometimes I recycled a document I
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needed (who keeps water bills for two years?) and other times I just lost
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it... because paper. I wrote this to make my life easier.
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How it Works
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============
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1. Buy a document scanner like [this one](http://www.brother.ca/en-CA/Scanners/11/ProductDetail/ADS1500W?ProductDetail=productdetail).
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2. Set it up to "scan to FTP" or something similar. It should be able to push
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scanned images to a server without you having to do anything.
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3. Have the target server run the *Paperless* consumption script to OCR the PDF
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and index it into a local database.
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4. Use the web frontend to sift through the database and find what you want.
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5. Download the PDF you need/want via the web interface and do whatever you
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like with it. You can even print it and send it as if it's the original.
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In most cases, no one will care or notice.
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Stability
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=========
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Paperless is still under active development (just look at the git commit
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history) so don't expect it to be 100% stable. I'm using it for my own
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documents, but I'm crazy like that. If you use this and it breaks something,
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you get to keep all the shiny pieces.
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Requirements
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============
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This is all really a quite simple, shiny, user-friendly wrapper around some very
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powerful tools.
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* [ImageMagick](http://imagemagick.org/) converts the images between colour and
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greyscale.
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* [Tesseract](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr) does the character recognition
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* [GNU Privacy Guard](https://gnupg.org)
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* [Python 3](https://python.org/) is the language of the project
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* [Pillow](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pillowfight/) loads the image data
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as a python object to be used with PyOCR.
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* [PyOCR](https://github.com/jflesch/pyocr) is a slick programmatic wrapper
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around tesseract
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* [Django](https://djangoproject.org/) is the framework this project is
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written against.
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* [Python-GNUPG](http://pythonhosted.org/python-gnupg/) decrypts the PDFs
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on-the-fly to allow you to download unencrypted files, leaving the
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encrypted ones on-disk.
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The keen eye might have noticed that we're converting a PDF to an image to be
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read by Tesseract, and to do this we're using a chain of: scanned PDF >
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Imagemagick > Pillow > PyOCR > Tesseract > text. It's not ideal, but
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apparently, Pillow lacks the ability to read PDFs, and PyOCR requires a Pillow
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object, so we're sort of stuck.
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Documentation
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=============
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It's all available on `ReadTheDocs`_.
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.. _ReadTheDocs: https://paperless.readthedocs.org/
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Important Note
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==============
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Document scanners are typically used to scan sensitive documents. Things like
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your social insurance number, tax records, invoices, etc. While paperless
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encrypts the original PDFs via the consumption script, the OCR'd text is *not*
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encrypted and is therefore stored in the clear (it needs to be searchable, so
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if someone has ideas on how to do that on encrypted data, I'm all ears). This
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means that paperless should never be run on an untrusted host. Instead, I
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recommend that if you do want to use it, run it locally on a server in your own
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home.
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.. |Documentation| image:: https://readthedocs.org/projects/ripe-atlas-tools/badge/?version=latest
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