mirror of
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69 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
69 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
# paperless
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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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1. Buy a document scanner like [this one](http://welcome.brother.com/sg-en/products-services/scanners/ads-1100w.html).
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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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## Requirements
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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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* [Python 3](https://python.org/) is the language of the project
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* [Pillow](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pillowfight/) converts the PDFs to
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images
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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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## Instructions
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1. Check out this repo to somewhere convenient and install the requirements
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listed here into your environment.
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2. Configure `settings.py` and make sure that `CONVERT_BINARY`, `SCRATCH_DIR`,
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and `CONSUMPTION_DIR` are set to values you'd expect:
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* `CONVERT_BINARY`: The path to `convert`, installed as part of ImageMagick.
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* `SCRATCH_DIR`: A place for files to be created and destroyed. The default
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is as good a place as any.
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* `CONSUMPTION_DIR`: The directory you scanner will be depositing files.
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Note that the consumption script will import files from here **and then
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delete them**.
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3. Run `python manage.py migrate`. This will create your local database.
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4. Run `python manage.py consume`. You may want to do this in a background
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process like a SystemD service or rc script because it runs in an infinite
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loop.
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5. Start the webserver with `python manage.py runserver`.
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6. Log into your new toy by visiting `http://localhost:8000/`.
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