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Papermerge DMS

Papermerge is a open source document management system designed to work with scanned documents. It extracts text from your scans (which might be PDF, TIFF, JPEG or PNG), indexes it, and prepares it for full text search. Papermerge provides the look and feel of modern desktop file browsers. It has features like tags, hierarchical folders and automations so that you can efficiently organize your documents.

Papermerge screenshot

What It Does

  • It extract and indexes text from your documents
  • Provides nice user interface to easily find your documents
  • Augments your documents with tags and metadata
  • Helps you instantly find your documents:
  • Helps you fix scanned documents issues

What It Doesn't Do

  • It does not take control of your documents. Documents are stored on filesystem in a simple and intuitive manner so that you can take snapshot of your data at any time
  • It does not stay in your way when you make decisions about your data
  • It does not overwrite your original documents

Right Tool for You?

To be efficient you always need to choose right tool for the problem. Because Document Management is too generic - I think that a definition of what is a Document in context of this software is needed.

What is a Document?

For Papermerge a document is anything which is a good candidate for archiving - some piece of information which is not editable but you need to store it for future reference. For example receipts are perfect examples - you don't need to read receipts everyday, but eventually you will need them for your tax declaration. In this sense - scanned documents, which are usually in PDF or TIFF format, are perfect match.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is de facto standard for storing archived documents. In correct technical terms - it is PDF/A subset. PDF/A differs from PDF by prohibiting features unsuitable for long-term archiving, such as font linking and encryption.

Most of the modern office scanners will output scanned files in PDF/A format. This is why, PDF is practically synonymous for document in context of Papermerge.

A picture made with your phone of a A4 paper document is regarded by Papermege as full fledged document, even though digitally it is stored as jpeg or png format. You can think of a picture made with a phone (of a document) as a bad quality scan.

What is Not a Document?

Out of scope are Office documents (ODT, DOCX, spreadsheets, presentations etc), text files (notes); these files are usually editable i.e. user can alter the content of the document. Any format of alterable type of document is out of scope for Papermerge project.

Papermerge is simply not designed to store books. Yes, you can scan a book and import it in Papermerge, but again - this is not what Papermerge was designed for.