A Bit More Than Mostly Searchable: Scanned Paper You Can Find with Stewart Russell
Channel: GTALUG
Date: 2017-04-25

Building on a GTALUG Lightning Talk from 2015, Stewart goes over what you'll need to turn messy piles of paper into a (mostly) organized archive of compact searchable electronic files in Linux.

This includes dealing with multifunction printers scanners and getting them to work, or at least be accessed by a linux machine. Choosing the data format to stored scanned files (like CBZ, Djvu or pdf). Why pdf is not the worst format after all. 

Image processing software: scan2pdf, ScanTailor(http://scantailor.org/), img2pdf (https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/img2pdf),  poppler, tesseract (https://github.com/tesseract-ocr), tiffcp and pdfbeads

Other software: GNU Parallel, xargs, 

Ocr training.

Saving and indexing documents with tools like recoll(https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/), tracker(https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Tracker/) and beagle (http://beagle-project.org/).

Storing offsite backup and encrypting filesystem on which files are stored.

Weasy print -- https://weasyprint.org/start/

Proof-of-concept script for doing ocr:

Ocr a pdf document to current directory as mono bitmap -- http://scruss.com/blog/dwim-ocr-sh/



Detailed notes and references -- https://wiki.gtalug.org/meeting:2017-04#notes

Meeting page -- https://gtalug.org/meeting/2017-04/