Paperman

Introduction

Paperman is a viewer for image files such as PDF, JPEG and its own variant of PaperPort’s .max file format. It also includes a search server with a REST API for querying paper repositories and a Flutter mobile app for browsing and viewing documents on Android and iOS.

Features

Simple GUI based around stacks and pages
View previews and browse through pages
Move pages in and out of stacks
Navigate through directories
Move stacks between directories
Print stacks and pages, including page annotations
Full undo/redo
Scanning support with presets
PDF, JPEG and TIFF conversion
OCR engine with full-text search
Search server with REST API
Mobile app with offline demo mode (see Paperman Mobile App)
Email files as PDF via Gmail (see Emailing files)

Emailing files

The Email menu (Ctrl+Shift+E for “Email as PDF”) converts the selected files to the chosen format, copies the resulting file to the clipboard as a text/uri-list and opens Gmail’s compose window in the default browser. Once the compose window is up, click in the message body and press Ctrl+V to attach the file.

The clipboard step is the only path that lands an actual attachment in Gmail: mailto: URLs cannot carry attachments per RFC 6068, so Gmail ignores any attachment argument on the compose URL itself. The same flow works with other webmail clients (Outlook on the web, Fastmail) that accept file paste into compose, and with desktop Chrome / Firefox generally.

If more than one file is selected they are packed into a single zip first, since most compose paste handlers only take one file.

Deployment

Development