I think I want a "document management solution" - though I'm not sure
that everyone understands the same idea by the term.
I've got a filing cabinet full of paperwork which is an absolute
nightmare to cope with. One of the key problems is that the documents
want to be indexed in different ways. All the documents are dated, but
they can be further sub-divided by subjects - lots of documents
appertain to several subjects. I frequently require to find either a
specific document, a sequence of related documents or similar. I rarely
need the original document - but often want a copy or just to check
some detail or other. Some documents are multi-page, some single
page... all can be easily scanned.
I'm interested to establish software which minimises the burden of
managing these documents - probably as scanned images. I'm familiar
with the Dj-Vu Libre library and think that format is fantastic - though
a less ambitious format would likely suffice (even at 200dpi grey scale
jpegs I get ~10,000 pages without needing more than one DVD to back
up...) A significant burden is in scanning and storing all these
documents - and this makes a good UI essential - preferably allowing a
single click to scan a document (incidentally can anyone recommend a
good, cheap, sheet-fed scanner?) before page-preview (cropping/rotating)
and assignment of "subject" classification and date-stamping. It would
be useful if there was an OCR pass in order to extract plain-text and to
index that - though this feature is not essential. There would need to
be a friendly UI in order to establish all the documents matching a
given subject classification (or group of classifications) - to preview
on-screen and offer an option to print... preferably in-order... maybe
with a watermark dating the copy?
Is anyone aware of any existing packages - preferably for Gentoo, but
any open-source solution would suffice.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions :-)
Steve
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