.. _getting_started: Getting Started ================ .. getting_started_documents: Documents ~~~~~~~~~ Let's start by clarifying the most important concept first: the document. For |project| 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 edit receipts or read them 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. Another important thing - if you take a picture of a paper document with your mobile phone - you'll have a file in jpeg format (or maybe png file format). In context of |project| that picture of a document (though just a single jpeg file) is a valid one page document. Generally speaking, pictures of the documents produced by your camera - might be regarded as bad quality scans. On the other hand, if you take a picture of a flower and upload that jpeg image to |project| - the 'document' will be processed. However, that jpeg format flower image is not a document in |project| sense. .. figure:: ../img/getting-started/pdf-png-jpeg-documents.png :alt: documents created by ingest files of different formats Figure 1. Png and jpeg formats along with PDF are natively supported Usually office formats with .docx (Microsoft Word), .odt (Libre Office), .txt (plain text) are not good candidates for archiving - as by their nature they are meant to be changed/edit regularly. However, once converted to PDF format (for instance Contract_C2.docx to Contract_C2.pdf) they are full fledged documents in |project| sense. .. important:: |project| 2.1 works only with PDF documents. Before version 2.1 |project| supported tiff, jpeg and png formats. Because of internal refactorings the support for tiff, jpeg and png formats was dropped for 2.1. **The support for tiff, jpeg and png file formats will be re-introduced in future versions.** .. getting_started_ocr: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ OCR is a technique to extract **text** information from **binary image formats**. This technique enables users to: * **copy/paste text** from the document's content * **search documents** by document's actual text content OCR is essential tool (or technique if you will) which helps basically to extract textual information and thus derive useful work-flows (based on document's actual content) with the documents. |project| relies on external open source specialized tools like `Google's Tesseract OCR `_ An informal, more detailed, explanation of term OCR is provided in :ref:`glossary `. .. getting_started_tags_and_folder: Tags and Folders ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Organizing documents in folders is very common. Thus the idea of keeping your documents in folders doesn't need further introduction. It may be worth mentioning that |project| supports folders and that folders may be hierarchical i.e. one folder can contain other folder(s) as well. This nesting (folder in folder) ca be arbitrarily deep. .. figure:: ../img/getting-started/folder-with-tags.png Figure 2. Folder with tags on it. The idea of using tags to organize your documents may be new for you though. Tags are kind of labels. You can associate (add) tags to a document or to a folder. Tags have a color and a name. Once tagged, documents can be searched by their tags. Conversely, is it also possible to show all the documents tagged with a particular tag(s). Both tags and folders complement each other and provide with powerful means to organize your documents. Learn more details about tags :doc:`here `. .. getting_started_page_management: Page Management ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Many times scanning documents in bulk yields documents with blank pages; some pages my be out of order or maybe part of totally different document. Even if you notice these flaws immediately it is time consuming and frustrating to redo scanning process. |project| helps you with your scanned documents like no other tool. With |project| you can delete blank or erroneous pages, you can move pages from one document into another and most importantly you can reorder document pages in case you need to do so. .. figure:: ../img/getting-started/blank-pages.png :alt: blank pages in a document Figure 3. Blank pages in a document. There is a separate chapter about :doc:`page_management` where you can learn details about this feature.