Not understanding

[dowlass moss]

I guess I don't understand what paperwork is meant to do.

The web site blurb said....

"Looking for a specific paper? Just type in a few keywords and tada! You can search across your PDF files too!"

Great, I thought, ideal.  So I've installed it and managed to import a bunch of PDF files, which is what I want to be able to search for, specifically a reference number which is present in each document. And the search for a reference number works and finds the document - great.  But then what?..... there's no linkage to where this original document is. I need a link that will take me straight to the file location, or even open it in Adobe Reader.

OK, I can see that Paperwork has a lot of OCR tools, and that is what has made my document reference numbers searchable, thumbs up.   But it isn't helping me GO to that document, it's just displaying it without any other function.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding Paperwork's purpose?  What it did (scan and list my PDFs) it did very well. But then it's left me hanging without any route to the original document. It doesn't even display the file name.

Am I doing something wrong?  Or is this just not the tool I thought it would be?

Many thanks.

[Sébastien Maccagnoni]

Hello ! The goal is to deal with your administrative papers and such. Not files.

You scan documents with OCR or you import PDF files, and you can forget about the original document, everything is in paperwork (and exportable).

Its goal is not to help you find files on your filesystem : it's not a search tool.

[dowlass moss]

Thanks Sebastien.  

But if it's not a search tool, how come the Paperwork web site front page advertises this...

"Looking for a specific paper? Just type in a few keywords and tada! You can search across your PDF files too!"

Sounds suspiciously like search to me!

And what are PDFs if not files?

I don't think Paperwork explains itself very well on the web site.  

Sorry, I think it's confusing.

[Sébastien Maccagnoni]

That's one sentence out of a complete website.

Okay, without the "your" word, maybe it would be less confusing.

But the website itself as a whole seems perfectly understandable to me...

[Egmont Schreiter]

Hello,

it should be easy to find a way to open the file in an external program
or to show the file in a browser... It is opensource, just try to find a
way and program it the way you like it! If not, I assume, this would end
as a point on a wish list.

btw: the best way to learn programming is to solve an own issue :-)

best regards
E.

Am 02.11.19 um 18:19 schrieb Sébastien Maccagnoni:

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[Sébastien Maccagnoni]

Well, as I understand it, dowlass moss wants Paperwork to point to another file somewhere on the filesystem, which is not Paperwork's goal at all...

[dowlass moss]

Egmont, 

I would love to open the file in an external programme - it's called Adobe Reader ;)  Most computers have it!  

Paperwork says I can import all my PDFs and [quote]'find them back in a snap[unquote].  And that's great.  But having searched for my file, and Paperwork having found it, I am then stuck, because...

1. Paperwork doesn't display the finlename so I can't be sure which PDF file it is.

2. Paperwork won't link to the actual file (wherever it is on my PC file system) so I can't open it.

So I'm left just looking at a PDF in Paperwork. Right........ ??

> an email to paperw...@googlegroups.com
> <mailto:paperwork-gui+unsub...@googlegroups.com>.

[Jerome Flesch]

Hello,


What you're looking for seems to be a desktop search tool or a
filesystem indexer (like Tracker[1] or Baloo[2] for instance), not a
personal document manager like Paperwork.

With desktop search tools you can sort files in complex directory trees
and name your PDF files.

With Paperwork, the goal is to be as lazy as possible. So Paperwork
organizes the files in the work directory and names the files, not you
(because 99.9% of the time, doing so yourself is actually a complete
waste of time).


Best regards,


---
[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Tracker (Linux only)
[2] https://community.kde.org/Baloo (Linux only)

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[dowlassmoss]

Hi Jerome,

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply directly.

I'll be honest, I still don't get it! I loved the way it imported a
bunch of already named PDFs for me, and made them searchable.
Unfortunately, it has removed all the file names and left me looking at
a nameless PDF which I now have to re-export and re-name. Odd to say
the least!

But no matter, if it doesn't do it, it doesn't do it. Thanks for the
software tips but I don't use Linux.

Best regards

Dowlass

[Z Z]

Hi there, Dowlass,

I'm a new user, looking for a solution to organize a bunch of scanned documents and am actively testing Paperwork.

From what I understand based on my limited usage, I would like to attempt an analogy if it helps at all, and hope it lines up with the developers' intentions. If you are a gmail user or familiar with the way gmail categorizes its email then you will appreciate what Paperwork is trying to do.

Gmail uses labels to categorize emails, which is different from the way outlook, thunderbird, or other traditional email clients organized their mail: using a hierarchy of folders. I won't go into all the pros/cons of one method over the other, but if you google labels/tags vs. folders you can find quite a few pages that go into it (this one is very concise and to the point). You can think of labels in gmail as metadata attached to your emails (similar to tags on bookmarks in firefox or other browsers).

A distinct advantage of using labels/tags over folders is that the former scales very well and is much easier to retrieve information, because one does not have to remember the arbitrary folder hierarchy that has been imposed upon the storage structure (and indeed this structure would be very different from user to user). Another valuable advantage is that you can apply many labels/tags to a single piece of email/data, but data can usually live in only a single location within a folder hierarchy and must be either duplicated, making it redundant, or hard/soft/sym linked with pointers. A simple example would be if you had an email folder structure as follows:

inbox->

• family
• <spouse's name>
• <child's name>
• <sibling's name>
  
• finances
• bills
  
• investments
  
• mortgage
• house
• contractors
• security
  

Now if you had an email thread involving your sibling who cosigned the mortgage to your house and the bank who issued the mortgage would that go in the folder of your sibling's name under family, the house folder, or the finances/mortgage folder? Similarly, if you received an email from your spouse with an attachment of an an invoice from your utility company detailing your heating charges and they asked if they should pay it where would that go under your folder structure?

The power of labels/tags is that you could apply any of the above names/tags/labels to incoming mail and use as many labels as you want. So if you searched for email that had the tags house and bills it would show you all emails tagged with house and bills. You could also do more complex queries such as house + bills, but exclude telephone and internet tags, for example.

Paperwork seems to work in a similar way to the way that gmail labels work (although it would be great to have nested labels like gmail), so you no longer need to keep a separate copy of all your documents in some other arbitrary folder structure. Even better, like gmail, you can search the full text of all the documents due to all the OCR capture. Instead of remembering where you stored documents in your folder hierarchy you use the previously created and assigned tags or search the body of the document to retrieve the data that you want within Paperwork.

As far as I understand it, Paperwork seems to be more of an archive tool for managing/searching/indexing static data, so if you have PDF data with fillable forms that you may need to frequently update and rework then maybe it is not the best choice.

Again, I'm just getting into it, so I could be completely off, but that's my first impressions of using the software and reading up on it.

Kind Regards,

Z

>> an email to paperw...@googlegroups.com.