scan-to-paperless 1.7.0

Tool to scan and process documents to palerless

Scan and prepare your document for Paperless

The main goal of this project is to have some productive process from the document scanning to Paperless. For that we need to prepare the documents some tools that need many resources, then the idea to to do it in the background and ideally on an other host like a NAS. A consecence of that it's a not easy to put it in place bet the you will be relay productive. The interface between the user and the process is the scan command to do the initial scan, and the filesystem to verify that the result is OK (and do some advance operations describe below) and validate it.

Features

• Scan the images optionally by using the Automatic Document Feeder
• Easily scan double sided images using the Automatic Document Feeder
• Change the images levels
• Deskew the images
• Crop the images
• Sharpen the images (disable by default)
• Dither the images (disable by default)
• Autorotate the images by using tesseract (To have the text on the right side)
• Assisted split, used to split a prospectus page in more pages (Requires to modify the yaml...)
• Append credit cart, used to have the too faces of a credit cart on the same page
• Be able to copy the OCR result from the PDF

Requirements

On the desktop:

• Python >= 3.6
• The scanimage command, on Windows it should be able to use an other command but it's never be tested. This command yould be an adapter that interpret the following arguments: --batch, --source=ADF, --batch-prompt, --batch-start, --batch-increment, --batch-count.

On the NAS:

• Docker

Install

On the desktop

$ python3 -m pip install scan-to-paperless
$ sudo activate-global-python-argcomplete # optional
$ echo PATH=$PATH:~/venv/bin >> ~/.bashrc

Create the configuration file on <home_config>/scan-to-paperless.yaml (on Linux it's ~/.config/scan-to-paperless.yaml), with:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sbrunner/scan-to-paperless/master/scan_to_paperless/config_schema.json

scan_folder: /home/sbrunner/Paperless/scan/
scanimage_arguments: # Additional argument passed to the scanimage command
  - --device=... # Use `scanimage --list` to get the possible values
  - --format=png
  - --mode=color
  - --resolution=300
default_args:
  ## Level
  # true: => do level on 15% - 85% (under 15 % will be black above 85% will be white)
  # false: => 0% - 100%
  # <number>: => (0 + <number>)% - (100 - number)%
  level:
  # If no level specified, do auto level
  auto_level: False
  # min level if no level end no autolovel
  min_level: 15
  # max level if no level end no autolovel
  max_level: 95

  ## Crop
  no_crop: False # Don't do any crop
  marging_horizontal: 9 # mm, the horizontal margin used on autodetect content
  marging_vertical: 6 # mm, the vertical margin used on autodetect content
  dpi: 300 # The DPI used to convert the mm to pixel

  # Sharpen
  sharpen: False # Do the sharpen

  # Dither
  dither: False # Do the dither

  ## OCR
  tesseract: True # Use tesseract to to an OCR on the document
  tesseract_lang: fra+eng # The used language

Full config documentation

On the NAS

The Docker support is required, Personally I use a Synology DiskStation DS918+, and you can get the *.syno.json files to configure your Docker services.

Otherwise use:

docker run --name=scan-to-paperless --restart=unless-stopped --detatch \
    --volume=<scan_folder>:/source \
    --volume=<consume_folder>:/destination \
    sbrunner/scan-to-paperless

You can set the environment variable PROGRESS to TRUE to get all the intermediate images.

To stop run:

docker stop scan-to-paperless
docker rm scan-to-paperless

Repertory link

You should find a way to synchronise or using sharing to link the scan folder on your desktop and on your nas.

You should also link the consume folder to paperless-ng probabls just by using the same folder.

Usage

1. Use the scan command to import your document, to scan your documents.

2. The document is transferred to your NAS (I use Syncthing).

3. The documents will be processed on the NAS.

4. Use scan-process-status to know the status of your documents.

5. Validate your documents.

6. If your happy with that remove the REMOVE_TO_CONTINUE file. (To restart the process remove one of the generated images, to cancel the job just remove the folder).

7. The process will continue his job and import the document in paperless-ng.

Job config file

In the config.yaml file present in the document folder, you can find sone information generated during the processing and some of the can be modified.

E.g. you can modify an image angle to fix the deskew, then remove a generated image for torce to regenerate the images.

Full job config documentation

Advance feature

Add a mask

If your scanner add some margin around the scanned image it will relay case some issue the deskew and the content detection.

To solve that you can add a black and white image namev mask.png in the root folder and draw in black the part that should not be taken in account.

Double sized scanning

1. Pour your sheets on the Automatic Document Feeder.

2. Run scan with the option --mode=double.

3. Press enter to start scanning the first side of all sheets.

4. Put again all your sheets on the Automatic Document Feeder without turning them.

The scan utils will rotate and reorder all the sheets to get a good document.

Credit card scanning

The options --append-credit-card will append all the sheets vertically to have the booth face of the credit card on the same page.

Assisted split

1. Do your scan as usual with the extra option --assisted-split.

2. After the process do his first pass you will have images with lines and numbers. The lines represent the detected potential split of the image, the length indicate the strength of the detection. In your config you will have something like:

assisted_split:
-   destinations:
    -   4 # Page number of the left part of the image
    -   1 # Same for the right page of the image
        image: image-1.png # name of the image
        limits:
    -   margin: 0 # Margin around the split
        name: 0 # Number visible on the generated image
        value: 375 # The position of the split (can be manually edited)
        vertical: true # Will split the image vertically
    -   ...
        source: /source/975468/7-assisted-split/image-1.png
-   ...

Edit your config file, you should have one more destination then the limits. If you put destinatination like that: 2.1, it mean that it will be the first part of the page 2 and the 2.2 will be the second part.

3. Delete the file REMOVE_TO_CONTINUE.

4. After the process do his first pass you will have the final generated images.

5. If it's OK delete the file REMOVE_TO_CONTINUE.