Deal with paperwork quickly so you can move on to something more interesting.
Like everyone else, you probably have to deal with some paperwork that inevitably comes in the mail.
When you're done, you're supposed to store it somewhere, "just in case". This is the cumbersome part.
Where do you store these documents ? How do you organize them ? You need to be able to find them afterwards, somehow ...
So here's the idea, when a bill (or whatever else) comes in, deal with it, then:
- Scan the document, have the scanner send it to your FTP server
- Stamp the document with today's date
- Shove it in a folder
And that's it. When you're done with your bills, just stack them in a folder, in the order you receive them.
In the background, paperdump watches your filesystem. When a document comes in it will:
- Move it to a permanent directory
- Run Tesseract on the scan, which gets you a plain text file.
- [TODO]: Compute a small preview
From now on, if you ever need to find the original document, just use can use ripgrep
(or any other full text search tool) with a keyword, and you'll know the exact date you scanned the document you're looking for.
You'll need clang, leptonica and tesseract with support for your language to build and run the project. On arch:
pacman -S clang leptonica tesseract tesseract-data-eng
cargo build --release, you'll need a working Rust toolchain to build this project.
The build will be available at target/release/paperdump.
Check out rustup to get up and running quickly.
Run paperdump -c config.toml, let it run in the background.
Files uploaded to the watch_folder will be processed and moved to the destination_folder.
Credits to my coworker Lewis for the cool idea !