this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
29 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40152 readers
573 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I assume many of you host a DMS such as Paperless and use it to organise the dead trees you still receive in the snail mail for some reason in the year of the lord 2023.

How do you encode your scans? JPEG is pretty meh for text even at better quantisation levels ("dirty" artefacts everywhere) and PNGs are quite large. More modern formats don't go into a PDF, which means multiple pages aren't possible (at least not in Paperless).

Discussion on GH: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/3756

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Using an OK scanner makes a big difference.

WDYM? The lossless scans SANE produces themselves subjectively look very good. My only issue is the transcoding to lossy formats I want to do in order to save >3/4 of the space.

[–] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh, it's common in my country to use a smartphone to 'scan' documents by actually just taking a lousy photo of them. It's so prevalent that when you tell someone to do a scan they usually do this instead.

I bought a cheap canon scanner for 50$ and it's pretty perfect for legal documents. A little slow maybe. I use SANE, then do lossy compression too.

In rare situations I'd then post process the PDF to even worse quality using ghostscript, for example when a foreign visa application form requires a scan of a really long document, but doesn't accept sizes over 2MB.

[–] sifrmoja@mastodon.social 1 points 1 year ago

@Saigonauticon @Atemu A scanner is a camera. Why complicate things?

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I use SANE, then do lossy compression too.

Well, what kind of lossy compression? JPEG?

IME, JPEG looks quite terrible for text documents -even at q=95.

[–] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah just jpeg. Always comes out perfectly legible.

[–] dpflug@hachyderm.io 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Atemu
I just use grayscale PNGs, myself. optipng usually takes them down to a decent size.
@Saigonauticon

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hmm, I'm using grayscale PNGs as my baseline here. A 150dpi scan is about 1.3MiB.

A (for the purpose of text documents) similar quality WEBP is about 1/4 of that.

[–] kyle@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago

You could also try adjusting the contrast a bit. I use an app called Genius Scan, which increases the contrast of the scanned image to reduce the number of bits needed per pixel. This reduces the size of the file quite a bit, although it obviously isn't a true representation of the scanned document. The TextCleaner imagemagick plugin looks like it's doing something similar.

[–] dpflug@hachyderm.io -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Atemu
Webp is much better, as long as your target reader(s) support it.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, as I said.

As also mentioned in the post, I need a solution for multiple pages and an image (no matter what format) only represents a single page and WEBPs don't go into PDFs.

[–] dpflug@hachyderm.io 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Atemu
There's not really a magic bullet here. The current answer is to prepare a PDF outside of paperless and feed it in: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/367

mpflanzer on that Issue is working on a file merging feature, but it's not ready yet.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

That's nice and all but does not answer how you'd create the PDF. Whether that happens outside paperless inside paperless does not make a difference. In the end, I need to create a PDF/A out of some images and the question on how to encode these images still remains.