I assume many of you host a DMS such as Paperless and use it to organise the dead trees you still receive in the snail mail for some reason in the year of the lord 2023.
How do you encode your scans? JPEG is pretty meh for text even at better quantisation levels (“dirty” artefacts everywhere) and PNGs are quite large. More modern formats don’t go into a PDF, which means multiple pages aren’t possible (at least not in Paperless).
Discussion on GH: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/3756
I’ve never used paperless but just checked it out and it looks pretty neat. My first thought would be to scan documents in a higher resolution, let the OCR happen, then convert the file to a JPEG or something smaller after you’ve extracted the text.
I spent a few minutes looking at their wiki and it looks like it might be possible.
Like I said though, no experience with this software so I’m not sure that’d actually work.
Interesting idea but I think I’d like to retain similar to original quality in case I wanted to redo OCR if/when Paperless’ OCR improves in the future.
By ‘paperless’, y’all mean this one? https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/
Correct. That’s the currently maintained paperless project.
Thanks! There’s a very interesting trail of dead projects to follow. But I got ngx working and it’s great so far.
I for one am still waiting for paperless-ngnxn2-next-3.0_hypr.
There is the DJVU format for this exact use case, but you’d need to convert them to, say, pdf for many use case. Its also a bit old and perhaps not maintained, soo…
HEIF and other modern video encoders (HEIF=H265) should fare a lot better than JPEG, though.
Hm, DJVU seems like an ancient format and it also only supports JPEG and J2K as far as lossy formats go.
I’d love to use more modern formats such as AVIF, HEIF or even WEBP but paperless doesn’t support some of them and images in general can only represent one page while many of my scans have multiple pages.
PDF/A
And how do you encode the images of the scan contained in the PDF/A? That’s the crux here.
I’m not sure I understand. I just scan anything and let my software spit out PDF/A
PDF/A is not an image format. As a document, it may contain images.
My PDF/A documents contain all kinds of content, including text and images. To me, it doesn’t matter what format the encoded images are, as long as I can open them 20 years from now. Why would one care one way or another?
I care that the text remains readable (both to me and also software) and that I don’t balloon my storage out of control.
JPEG (even at higher levels) subjectively degrades text in particular to a degree that I worry about the former and PNG makes me worry about the latter.
My current plan is to go with the latter since storage is a relatively cheap issue to fix while data loss is pretty much permanent.
