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technopagan@lemmy.world

What is an efficient workflow to separate and organize bulk scanned PDF documents? (At work; software is limited.) (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by endless@lemmy.ml to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

At work I have been given a task to organize some documents. Please help me, I'm overwhelmed.

TLDR: Manually separate PDFs into individual documents (variable page length), assign each document to a category, and identify the date of the document. Need a fast way to do it. On Windows.

Here is a longer description of my task.

Goals:

Chop up the bulk PDFs to create 1 PDF per document
Sort each of them into one of 10 categories
Identify the date in each document. Include it in the filename. Optimally, insert it into the document itself (e.g. top right hand corner of first page, in the margin so it doesn't cover anything)
Would be nice:
- Rerun the OCR; I think it could be better. At home I would use ocrmypdf
- Clean up the scans: fix alignment, remove artifacts etc (only if effort is trivial and 0% risk of data loss)

Inputs:

Printed out, it's a stack of papers about 6-8cm tall
Has been provided in bulk PDFs about 40-60 pages each
Most individual documents are 2-5 pages in length, with some being 10-20

Document characteristics:

Scanned on an actual scanner; some carefully, others not
- Have been optimized for small smile size
- Mostly black & white, some grey scale
Business documents, records, official correspondence etc. Typed, not handwriting. English.
They are all in some sort of standardized format, but from many different sources, each with their own format
Have had some sort of OCR applied to them; it isn't very good especially when the scans aren't perfect.

Work environment and constraints

Because I am at work, I am using a standard Windows workstation that is set up for office (not developer) use.
I have asked for the full version of Adobe Acrobat to be installed, because they have a license for that. I've never used it. Maybe it will do all of this but based on how profoundly annoying Reader is, I am skeptical.
I can install things that don't require administrator privileges. I can ask for administrator to install something if I am reasonably confident it'll be useful and safe but I can't be annoying asking for things all the time. I strongly prefer open source tools.
Cannot under any circumstances use anything online, cloud, external AI. All data must stay local.
I might be able to justify using linux in the future if this is an ongoing task (it might be) so linux-only suggestions are welcome but won't be implemented first-line. Desktop applications > self hosted servers or command line.

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[–] MisterNeon@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh that sucks! Good luck, I'm out of ideas.

[–] endless@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

that's how I know how tall it is printed out! lol