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

  • AtemuOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    How do you handle multiple pages?

    • ShelldorEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

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

      • AtemuOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

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

        This is about scans of physical paper.

        • ShelldorEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Does your scanner not have a scan to pdf option?

          • AtemuOPEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • ShelldorEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              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?

              • AtemuOPEnglish
                1·
                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.