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115 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
115 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
# Paperless
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Index and archive all of your scanned 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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Paperless does not control your scanner, it only helps you deal with what your
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scanner produces
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1. Buy a document scanner that can write to a place on your network. If you
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need some inspiration, have a look at the [scanner recommendations](https://paperless.readthedocs.io/en/latest/scanners.html)
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page.
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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. Of course if
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your scanner doesn't know how to automatically upload the file somewhere,
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you can always do that manually. Paperless doesn't care how the documents
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get into its local consumption directory.
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3. Have the target server run the Paperless consumption script to OCR the file
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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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Here's what you get:
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## Stability
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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. You can backup the sqlite3
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database, media directory and your configuration file to be on the safe side.
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## Requirements
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This is all really a quite simple, shiny, user-friendly wrapper around some
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very 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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* [Unpaper](https://www.flameeyes.eu/projects/unpaper) despeckles and deskews
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the scanned image.
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* [GNU Privacy Guard](https://gnupg.org/) is used as the encryption backend.
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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 as
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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://www.djangoproject.com/) 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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## Documentation
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It's all available on [ReadTheDocs](https://paperless.readthedocs.org/).
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## Similar Projects
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There's another project out there called [Mayan EDMS](https://mayan.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)
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that has a surprising amount of technical overlap with Paperless. Also based
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on Django and using a consumer model with Tesseract and Unpaper, Mayan EDMS is
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*much* more featureful and comes with a slick UI as well, but still in Python
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2. It may be that Paperless consumes fewer resources, but to be honest, this is
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just a guess as I haven't tested this myself. One thing's for certain though,
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*Paperless* is a **way** better name.
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## Important Note
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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 files 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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## Donations
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As with all Free software, the power is less in the finances and more in the
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collective efforts. I really appreciate every pull request and bug report
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offered up by Paperless' users, so please keep that stuff coming. If however,
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you're not one for coding/design/documentation, and would like to contribute
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financially, I won't say no ;-)
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The thing is, I'm doing ok for money, so I would instead ask you to donate to
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the [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees](https://donate.unhcr.org/int-en/general).
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They're doing important work and they need the money a lot more than I do.
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