this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Run It Yourself

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Overlaps somewhat with /c/floss_replacement and /c/privacy; crossposts welcome

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How do you encode your paper scans? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1800585

I assume many of you host a DMS such as Paperless and use it to organise the dead trees you still receive in the snail mail for some reason in the year of the lord 2023.

How do you encode your scans? JPEG is pretty meh for text even at better quantisation levels ("dirty" artefacts everywhere) and PNGs are quite large. More modern formats don't go into a PDF, which means multiple pages aren't possible (at least not in Paperless).

Discussion on GH: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/3756

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How do you handle multiple pages?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use paperless-ngx. All my scans are in PDF format.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My multiple page documents such as bank statements are just uploaded as pdfs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I also get my bank statements digitally; those are trivial to handle.

This is about scans of physical paper.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does your scanner not have a scan to pdf option?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've got a USB scanner that (presumably) just sends a bitmap. It's up to the software instructing the scanner to convert that bitmap into other formats.

Even if it did do that itself, how would it encode the images inside the PDFs? It's the same issue, just that I wouldn't get to choose.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have looked into mine and it has auto character recognition.

Couldn't you just scan your images in concert them to a pdf and run OCR on them either using Adobe reader or an online service then upload them to paperless?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Why would I do that when paperless already does OCR through ocrmypdf internally?

My problem is not the steps before or after the conversion to PDF but the conversion to PDF itself. Getting an image into a PDF isn't a trivial manner from the technical side, especially if you care about preserving its content.