I have bunch of textbooks, and a lot of lecture notes and notes from colleagues, all in PDF format. What is a good way to classify, manage, store, and read these PDF files? I am trying calibre-web, but it seems difficult to find applications to connect to it.
Paperless-ngx! https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
I third this! I saw title and came to say.
It’s actively being developed still, I get emails like once every 1–3 weeks, sometimes more. Sometimes less.
I use docker desktop for this. I also lowkey learned how to set up a multi-database for this at one point, but kinda stopped after I got it working. More to see if I could.
I also tried bare metal building this, but had shit luck. It’s been a couple years though. Docker just makes it easy as hell.
I still keep all the originals separate just in case, and the tool can help you make multiple copies too (like PDF-A). I’ve never needed to go back and use those though, as Paperless just works so well once you get the hang of it and how you want your data stored.
I picked a structure that kind of lets me find stuff easily even if the tool is not running (like just by folder structures).
I’ve yet to make this online available for obvious reasons. But it would be nice to be able to pull up pretty much any document you need, any time.
Any suggestions on safe web access quickly from a phone might be helpful (WireGuard maybe?) if you have them.
Paperless-ngx is great, but it is particularly bad at handling PDF documents. Roughly half my documents just won’t import.
https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/issues/3933
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/yfjxww/paperlessngx_not_all_pdf_files_can_be_imported/
Maybe paperless-ngx can be a solution for this.
https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
As a card-carrying librarian, I recommend using Zotero as a client with a WebDAV backend (I use Nextcloud).
If you’re studying or writing anything in which you need to cite your sources, Zotero is excellent and has integrations with many word processors. I’m pretty sure it can output your references as BibTeX if you’re in one of the disciplines that uses LaTeX.
Contrary to the others here,while I love Paperless,using it for textbooks and notes only worked “somewhat” for me - it becomes quite clunky after a while.
Personally I would rather go with Calibre if I were you if you have more textbooks than notes. Even for notes, they can be attached as well and better organised than Paperless.
(And don’t get me wrong paperless is awesome and I use it heavily)
I believe this new project should hit your need quite well!
Papra is quite new in the selfhosted sphere but a welcome addition. Yet to test it myself but it sounds and looks very promising > https://github.com/papra-hq/papra
