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Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

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Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#91

Post by purerandomness »

jcelerier wrote: post #59
tombrossman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Question: why bother organizing papers? Because being organised makes you more effective. With your 'throw it all in a box' system, you have a high barrier to finding documents in the future and this discourages you from doing so. However, with a more organised approach you are more likely to retrieve specific documents. One example: Some mid-priced electronic device breaks a few months after you buy it. You might…

> With your 'throw it all in a box' system, you have a high barrier to finding documents in the future and this discourages you from doing so. In fifteen years of keeping my mail I maybe had once or twice to go back in time more than a month or two ago.

Then that system obviously doesn't solve one of your pains.

I have to dig out older documents almost daily.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#92

Post by mdaniel »

theomega wrote: post #63

I want to show an alternative approach to managing your documents: Store them in your IMAP/Mails. Either on an own account or in a dedicated sub-folder. I wrote some small python scripts [1] which allow you to: - Add an email with the PDF attached to your document collection. The script supports adding a subject and adding tags to it - Go over all the emails and run an OCR (tesseract) on them: Attach the OCR result t…

Just ensure you pick a "good" encoding scheme, because base64-ing PDFs will balloon that storage space in a very big hurry

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#93

Post by mdaniel »

SomewhatLikely wrote: post #19

Something I've wanted that might be possible is software that takes in a video of me flipping the pages of a notebook and converts that to a PDF of the notebook.

I regret that I can't immediately find the video which discussed it, but this gets in the ballpark of what I saw: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271462470_OCR_from_...

IIRC, it wasn't ~vaporware~ researchware, but nor was it "clone this repo, away you go"

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#94

Post by bketelsen »

billbrown wrote: post #80
gravypod wrote: post #3

Will this automatically center and apply perspective transforms to pictures taken with phone cameras?

The best version of this that I've seen is Scanner Pro by Readdle. I had to scan three months worth of food receipts for an insurance claim and this feature was a lifesaver.

seriously, thank you for mentioning this. Great app!

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#95

Post by gravypod »

bvrlt wrote: post #67
gravypod wrote: post #3

Will this automatically center and apply perspective transforms to pictures taken with phone cameras?

You should check Genius Scan (for iOS and Android) that does that for you automatically, and much more: https://www.thegrizzlylabs.com/genius-scan/ It also doesn't tie you to a specific ecosystem. Disclaimer: I'm on of the authors of Genius Scan :)

There are many solutions for systems like this. Unfortunately none are open source.

Most documents I do want to keep record of are sensitive. I don't trust a closed-source app with that kind of information.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#96

Post by dhruvkar »

jopsen wrote: post #44

Question: why bother organizing papers? I just throw everything in a box, if I ever need it again later it'll take a long time to find.. but I rarely need to find a document again. Complexity of archiving a document is O(1) with a very small constant. Complexity of retrieval is O(N) for a large N. But I have few retrievals in my system, so why pay a higher per document cost?

I agree with the sentiment that most papers have very little value in the long run.

So I have 4 'bins' to categorize physical papers - scan & keep, scan & shred, shred, throw.

This system usually eliminates a lot of papers that I would otherwise mindlessly/OCD'ly scan.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#97

Post by kerridge0 »

karinato wrote: post #82

For those wondering about the relationship between Mayan EDMS, Paperless and Open Paperless here is a story line summary of the saga. Roberto Rosario (the creator of Mayan) is a very well known name in the Django, Python, document management, maker, hacking, open health and open source in the goverment circles. - https://speakerdeck.com/siloraptor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Rosario - https://www.pycon.it…

Mayan isn't hosted on GitHub so that may explain the difference in popularity.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#98

Post by matt_the_bass »

myaso wrote: post #89
ishi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I was involved with a startup that built a document management system for consumers, and we actually got pretty good results with OCR + automatic tagging based on a very simple database that maps keywords to tags. Let's say you want to auto-tag bills and other documents from your ISP. So you add the ISP's name, phone number, website address etc. into the database - any uniquely-identifying keywords th…

Out of curiosity what is the state of the art today for extracting text or other data from scanned documents (forms, legal docs, receipts, etc) ?

I don't have an exact answer but can tell you that Expensify still resorts to human parsing sometimes. How often "sometimes" is, I have no idea. I would guess a lot.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#99

Post by matt_the_bass »

purerandomness wrote: post #91
jcelerier wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With your 'throw it all in a box' system, you have a high barrier to finding documents in the future and this discourages you from doing so. In fifteen years of keeping my mail I maybe had once or twice to go back in time more than a month or two ago.

Then that system obviously doesn't solve one of your pains. I have to dig out older documents almost daily.

What types of things are you looking for so frequently? Maybe you could organize a subset of papers?

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#100

Post by matt_the_bass »

jopsen wrote: post #44

Question: why bother organizing papers? I just throw everything in a box, if I ever need it again later it'll take a long time to find.. but I rarely need to find a document again. Complexity of archiving a document is O(1) with a very small constant. Complexity of retrieval is O(N) for a large N. But I have few retrievals in my system, so why pay a higher per document cost?

I used to organize every bill in a file cabinet. Then a few years ago I switched to "throw everything for a quarter in a single folder." Now I'm about to switch to throw everything for the year in a single folder". (a few exceptions for major expenses like house, car etc). This allows me reduce the possible search space a lot with very little effort. Over the past few years I've found myself looking for 1 or two things from the past year. Total time spent was 10 minutes. This was way less time than filing everything.
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