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Incidentally, I checked out doo on OS X just few days ago, thinking it would help me with my OCR problem. It was a huge install and in the end it could not conn

Incidentally, I checked out doo on OS X just few days ago, thinking it would help me with my OCR problem. It was a huge install and in the end it could not connect to my scanner. Not sure it was their problem per se, could be some peculiarity of my OS X setup, but I figured their main purpose was not what I wanted. Here is what I want and it would be interesting to know how other people on HN solve that. I have no problem managing my digital documents, I have that covered. However paper (carbon-copy, dead-tree) - now this gives me a lot of headache. Even though I subscribed to electronic everything I could, I still many documents coming in paper: user manuals, medical test results, credit card agreements, some bills etc etc. I hate managing and storing paper. I tried to setup a system that would scan, clean up, OCR documents, store searchable PDFs and (the key part) stored PDFs into folders (in my online backup provider's folder of choice) according to keywords or even performed some kind of machine learning classification (rent, medical, receipts, etc). I had even created a concoction on Linux from SANE command line, ImageMagick, bunch of Python scripts that did that more or less, but once I moved to OS X that stopped working and I did not have time to port it yet.

ciniglio 13y ago
Have you read "Paperless" by David Sparks? It addresses a lot of what you're asking for and has several suggestions for workflows that could achieve your goal. http://macsparky.com/paperless/ http://macsparky.com/paperless/
kstrauser 13y ago
On OS X, I use DEVONthink Pro Office with a ScanSnap iX500 scanner, and does pretty much what you're describing. OCR is really good. While it manages the directory structure, all documents are stored "bare" in its filesystem folder. That is, you can create a Foo.pdf in DEVONthink and then access it from ~/Documents/whatever/PDFS/Foo.pdf (or however it names the directories). Machine learning classifies incoming documents and can suggest relationships between them. I'm not related to them, I promise. :-) I'd bought DT a while back but hadn't used it much until I got Doo as part of a software bundle. I played with it a while, realized I already had DT which was much more powerful, and started using it more.
- rsanders 13y ago
  DEVONthink Pro Office doesn't have the beauty of Doo or a name that's even remotely decent from a marketing point of view, but it is a workhorse of a doc processing engine. And it even syncs between multiple computers and Dropbox for your own private cloud. The only thing I'm missing now is an Android "client" for it.
konradb 13y ago
> stored PDFs into folders (in my online backup provider's folder of choice) according to keywords or even performed some kind of machine learning classification (rent, medical, receipts, etc). Sorry to piggyback: I have had a similar problem - hating paper, but drowning in it. I'm readying an OSX program to do this, if you are anyone else would be interested in trying it out/beta testing it (once it is ready! It isn't quite yet ready) in exchange for a free copy that would be awesome. So far designed to work for Scansnap or a workflow that OCR's the PDF's first.

ciniglio 13y ago

Have you read "Paperless" by David Sparks? It addresses a lot of what you're asking for and has several suggestions for workflows that could achieve your goal. http://macsparky.com/paperless/ http://macsparky.com/paperless/

kstrauser 13y ago

On OS X, I use DEVONthink Pro Office with a ScanSnap iX500 scanner, and does pretty much what you're describing. OCR is really good. While it manages the directory structure, all documents are stored "bare" in its filesystem folder. That is, you can create a Foo.pdf in DEVONthink and then access it from ~/Documents/whatever/PDFS/Foo.pdf (or however it names the directories). Machine learning classifies incoming documents and can suggest relationships between them. I'm not related to them, I promise. :-) I'd bought DT a while back but hadn't used it much until I got Doo as part of a software bundle. I played with it a while, realized I already had DT which was much more powerful, and started using it more.

rsanders 13y ago
DEVONthink Pro Office doesn't have the beauty of Doo or a name that's even remotely decent from a marketing point of view, but it is a workhorse of a doc processing engine. And it even syncs between multiple computers and Dropbox for your own private cloud. The only thing I'm missing now is an Android "client" for it.

konradb 13y ago

> stored PDFs into folders (in my online backup provider's folder of choice) according to keywords or even performed some kind of machine learning classification (rent, medical, receipts, etc). Sorry to piggyback: I have had a similar problem - hating paper, but drowning in it. I'm readying an OSX program to do this, if you are anyone else would be interested in trying it out/beta testing it (once it is ready! It isn't quite yet ready) in exchange for a free copy that would be awesome. So far designed to work for Scansnap or a workflow that OCR's the PDF's first.