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Papermerge DMS

Papermerge DMS is open source document management system for digital archives.

It is designed to be user friendly: it has easy to use desktop like web interface with familiar features like folders or drag 'n drop. In same time, it has very powerful DMS features: document versioning, custom fields, path templates, OCR, full text search, users and permissions management.

It supports PDF, TIFF, JPEG and PNG document file formats. Papermerge DMS is perfect tool for long term storage of your documents.

Papermerge screenshot

Features Highlights

  • Supports PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG file formats
  • Desktop like user interface
  • Dual panel mode
  • Document versioning
  • Custom fields
  • Document types
  • OCR - used to extract text for documents indexing
  • OCRed text overlay (you can download document with OCRed text overlay)
  • Full text search (supports multiple search engines)
  • Tags - assign colored tags to documents or folders
  • Folders - users can organize documents in folders
  • Multi-User (Users/Groups/Permissions)
  • Authorization via granular permissions to limit users' scopes
  • SSO - single sign on using standard protocols such as OIDC
  • REST API
  • Page Management - delete, reorder, rotate, merge, move, extract pages

What is a Document?

In short: document = PDF.

For Papermerge DMS 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 - you don't need to read receipts everyday, you don't need to change them, but eventually you will need them for your tax declaration. scanned documents, which are usually in PDF or TIFF format, are documents in Papermerge DMS sense.

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 smartphone of A4 paper document is regarded by Papermerge DMS as document.