This is the third in a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. For this article, we’ll put Paperwork under the spotlight.
Paperwork is designed to simplify the management of your paperwork. The software lets you scan or import your documents, and quickly find what you want, wrapped together in a GTK interface.
Paperwork relies on a raft of open source projects for its core functionality. Specifically, it uses SANE/Pyinsane to scan pages (Libinsane is in development which is the successor of Pyinsane). The optical character recognition is fulfilled by Tesseract/Pyocr. Whoosh is used to index and search documents, Simplebayes for label identification, and Pillow/Libpillowfight for image manipulation. Libpoppler provides PDF support.
The software is written in the Python programming language. This is cross-platform software with both Linux and Windows platforms supported.
Installation
You can install the software using Flatpak, a technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux. Installing with Flatpak means Paperwork will run in a container. You have to ensure the scanning daemon is enabled on the host system, with connection allowed from 127.0.0.1.
The simplest way to install the software is arguably with an unofficial package. There are packages available for Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch Linux, and other distributions.
The full source code is available too.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Search / Labels
Page 4 – Other Features
Page 5 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| AES Crypt | Encrypt files using the Advanced Encryption Standard |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| broot | Next gen tree explorer and customizable launcher |
| Cerebro | Fast application launcher |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| CopyQ | Advanced clipboard manager |
| croc | Securely transfer files and folders from the command-line |
| Deskreen | Live streaming your desktop to a web browser |
| duf | Disk usage utility with more polished presentation than the classic df |
| eza | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| Extension Manager | Browse, install and manage GNOME Shell Extensions |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| horcrux | File splitter with encryption and redundancy |
| Kooha | Simple screen recorder |
| KOReader | Document viewer for a wide variety of file formats |
| Imagine | A simple yet effective image optimization tool |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| lsd | Like exa, lsd is a turbo-charged alternative to ls |
| Mark Text | Simple and elegant Markdown editor |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| navi | Interactive cheatsheet tool |
| noti | Monitors a command or process and triggers a notification |
| Nushell | Flexible cross-platform shell with a modern feel |
| nvitop | GPU process management for NVIDIA graphics cards |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Oh My Zsh | Framework to manage your Zsh configuration |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| pastel | Generate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors |
| PDF Mix Tool | Perform common editing operations on PDF files |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| Rnote | Sketch and take handwritten notes |
| scrcpy | Display and control Android devices |
| Sticky | Simulates the traditional “sticky note” style stationery on your desktop |
| tldr | Simplified and community-driven man pages |
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| Whoogle Search | Self-hosted and privacy-focused metasearch engine |
| Zellij | Terminal workspace with batteries included |
It seems like such a good idea, but on my Ryzen 2700X with GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, it is impossibly slow on documents of a few hundred pages. I can’t get the cut and paste to work either.
Have you raised the issues upstream?
Yes, and Jerome (author) says it’s a known issue for large pdf files.
More likely to be an issue with Cairo.
Smooth GUI, but not intuitive and most of the time it is not clear what it is doing. I cannot tell when OCR was successful, little to no progress indication on most actions. It has a lot of potential, but also a lot of potential for improvement.