gImageReader VS paperless-ngx

On tesseract base here is a software to make a scan a text searchable pdf. It take a bit of time and can be a bit tedious but it does the work! https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader/releases It does not work well on cursive writing of course. It's a bit less heavy code sided solution. Good luck!

I'm working with old newspaper PDFs to convert them into DOC formats. I'm having a great time with gImageReader by highlighting columns and converting them to plain text. Then I take that plain text into Libreoffice Writer (7.0.4.2) to clean up and save. If this were a book as opposed to a newspaper with ads and columns, it would have bee a lot easier to convert and format.

It would help to know a bit more of your usecase. If you're looking to just extract the text (ie, take all the textual content of your PDF and drop it into a separate text document), there are solutions like ABBYY Finereader and gImageReader. If you're looking to make PDFs searchable (keeping the scanned pages, but adding a text layer underneath so you can search and copy from them), there's NAPS2 (which has an additional command line tool for automation) and OCRmyPDF.

OpenSource OCR... for desktop users I like "gImageReader" URL: https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader (Technically is GUI for tessaract)

gImageReader is the linux standard that I'm aware of. It's a GUI to Tessaeract, but IIRC you can use other models if you have them.

gImageReader as a simple OCR application

https://github.com/manisandro/gImageReader ^^ seems like it has installers for different OS's

I steered a friend towards Paperless (and away from an LLM solution) as a way of searching/accessing GBs of architectural PDFs recently - so far, it’s apparently working well for them.

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can find your physical documents easier. With features such as tags, full text search, multi-user permissions system, this is a dream for those who like to keep an organized folder of files and documents.

Since last year I’ve been configuring and maintaining my homelab setup and it is just amazing.

I’ve learned so much about containers, virtual machines and networking. Some of the self hosted applications like paperless-ngx [1] and immich [2] are much superior in terms of features than the proprietary cloud solutions.

With the addition of VPN services like tailscale [3] now I can access my homelab from anywhere in the world.

The only thing missing is to setup a low powered machine like NUC or any mini PC so I can offload the services I need 24/7 and save electricity costs.

If you can maintain it and have enough energy on weekends to perform routine maintenance and upgrades. I would 100% recommend setting up your own homelab.

[1] https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

This has been posted a few times already, but I cannot tell you how life changing Paperless NGX is for organizing PDFs. As someone who wrangles all of the insurance and bills for my house, this open source software is so damn good.

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

I maintain Bash script to quickly set it up locally on Linux with Podman. Give it a spin if you want to kick the tires.

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

Personally, I use https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup to archive all my emails and then only keep them on the remote server for as long as I need to (basically until I read them and respond or download an attachment into https://docs.paperless-ngx.com )