Paperman

Introduction

Paperman is an electronic filing cabinet: it scans paper into stacks of pages, and lets you view, arrange, annotate, print, search and send them. It reads and writes PDF, JPEG and its own variant of PaperPort’s .max file format. It runs on Linux, Windows and macOS.

It also includes a search server with a REST API for querying paper repositories, which the desktop can work with over the network, and a Flutter mobile app for browsing and viewing documents on Android and iOS.

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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 from sheet-fed scanners, fast, with presets (see Scanning):

    • pages cut to the sheet, and straightened, by the scanner

    • pages without colour stored as grey or mono, while a page with a coloured mark or note on it stays in colour

    • blank pages found and left out

    • sheets fed sideways turned upright, and sheets longer than any paper size scanned whole

    • a misfeed or jam waits to be cleared, and loses no pages

    • scanning from the command line (see Command-line Interface)

  • PDF, JPEG and TIFF conversion

  • Unfolding scanned booklets into their pages

  • OCR engine with full-text search

  • Search server with REST API, whose repositories the desktop can show and change, with changes made elsewhere shown as they happen (see Paperman Search Server)

  • Mobile app with offline demo mode (see Paperman Mobile App)

  • Email files as PDF via Gmail (see Emailing files)

  • Linux, Windows (x64 and Arm) and macOS

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.

Copying files

The Copy command (Ctrl+C) converts the selected files to PDF and puts the result on the clipboard as a text/uri-list, the same way the Email menu does, but without opening a browser. Paste it wherever a file is wanted: a Gmail compose window (Ctrl+V attaches it), a file manager, or a chat window. As with email, more than one file is packed into a single zip first.

User Guide

Deployment

Development