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

  • Shelldor
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Does your scanner not have a scan to pdf option?

    • AtemuOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      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.

      • Shelldor
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        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?

        • AtemuOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          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.