PaperWork – Personal Document Manager

PaperWork is a free open-source application for managing personal documents through scanning and digital organization. It’s available in versions for Windows and Linux. The application was first published in 2015. It was developed on GitHub and later moved to GitLab as a Gnome community project.

How does PaperWork work?

The first important function of the PaperWork application is scanning paper documents. The application automatically determines the page orientation (portrait or landscape). After scanning, a high-quality OCR (optical character recognition) algorithm is applied, which converts pages into readable text. This allows for later searching of the document content itself, not just its titles. When it finishes scanning and text recognition, PaperWork opens the document for editing, so desired changes can be made.

All scanned documents are stored in one directory. This makes it easier to create a backup of the entire documentation or to synchronize with cloud platforms: Nextcloud, Syncthing, SparkleShare, etc. This way, all user documents are accessible regardless of which digital device is being used.

To make documents easier to recognize and search, labels (tags) in different colors can be added. Over time, based on user behavior, PaperWork learns where each label should be placed and thus maintains good document organization. PaperWork can search PDF files for given keywords. This significantly saves time in finding the desired document.

PaperWork applies generally accepted standards in working with documents such as hOCR, PDF, and JPG. Therefore, it easily connects and cooperates with other applications for importing or exporting documents. The application uses several free third-party tools and libraries. We’ll mention just a few: PyOCR (a Python library that simplifies the use of OCR tools), Libinsane (a library that facilitates the use of scanners on different operating systems), Libpillowfight (a small library containing various image processing algorithms).

PaperWork accelerates work with documents

A terminological clarification is needed to avoid confusion: when you search for PaperWork on the internet, you’ll come across the OpenPaper.work platform. It hosts various projects related to document management. Among them, Paperwork occupies the main place. OpenPaper.work is a more comprehensive project that provides the infrastructure and resources needed for the development and improvement of this application.

The motto of PaperWork’s authors is “let it be simple”. The application has gained popularity due to its functionalities that include text recognition (OCR) and the ability to organize documents in a simple way. The idea is to avoid manual document organization as much as possible.

PaperWork is an open-source application. If you know how, you can adapt it to your needs and connect it with the applications you use. PaperWork is a personal document manager for scanning, organizing, and searching. As such, it can be useful to a very wide range of users, as there are more and more documents and less time.

The Download button below is a link for the Windows version of the program. Links for various Linux distributions can be found HERE.

Platform:
Windows and Linux

https://www.openpaper.work/en/

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