What is document management?

Documents must be properly stored, retrieved on time, and carefully handled.. All practices and organization techniques intended to achieve these goals form document management. Ideal document management must ensure that all documents are:

• Efficiently and securely stored.
• Easily accessible only by the intended people.
• Organized properly.

Documentation is here to stay. So efficient document management is also crucial for efficient and smooth functioning of any workflow or organization. Document scanning is the first and a pivotal task in documentation management nowadays, since many organizations are rapidly moving their physical documents and manuscripts to digital form. Document scanning makes documents easier to access, manage, and store. Let us see more about document scanning, its role in document management, and also a Python script to simplify document scanning.

Why is document scanning important?

Here are a few reasons why document scanning is important to any organization or team.

Makes documents easier to access

Scanned documents can be accessed from anywhere in the world with a network connection.

Improved searchability

Scanned documents and documents in digital format are easy to search for key terms.

Multi-layered security

With scanned documents, there are options to add as many security layers as you want. Encryption, two-factor authentication, secure networks, backups, and access controls (RBAC) are some examples for layered security for scanned documents.

Efficient storage

Documents in digital format consume less storage space and logistics cost.

Best document scanner

The first important step when it comes to choosing the best document scanner available online is to list down your requirements. An ideal document scanner should provide the benefits listed below.

Quality of the output: The scanner should provide at least a quality of 300dpi because that makes the documents legible for understanding.

Multi-device compatibility: The best scanner application should give you cross-OS support. The scanner should provide you the freedom to be installed on both Android and iOS devices.

Multi-page scanning: A single document can have multiple pages. The application trying to compete for the best document scanner app should provide an option to add multiple pages to a single document and collate them as one file.

Upload to cloud: Cloud is the future of storage. An ideal document scanner should have in-built options to upload the scanned files to the cloud and other platforms.

What do we recommend: In our test, ecopdf.io bagged the most points than any other tools we tried. We think you will also like it because it has built-in features to set standard sizes (like US letter, A5, and business card), support both iOS and Android devices, multiple filters to correct the colors, and exporting multiple documents.

Using Python for document scanning

Python is one of developers’ favorite languages for creating document scanning applications. It also arms you with the ability to automate a lot of document management aspects like organizing, processing, and scanning documents. To get a quick start, you can use existing Python libraries to help you with document management. We have listed a few Python libraries for document management and their uses below.

reportlab: To create PDFs.

pytesseract: For enhanced scanning through optical character recognition (OCR - more on this later)

pdfminer.six: To extract text from existing PDFs.

PyPDF2: To read, write, and modify PDFs.

What is OCR?

OCR is short for optical character recognition, which is a feature that extracts machine readable texts from documents. You can use the Python library pytesseract for OCR. Here is a sample script to get you started. Customize this script according to your requirements.

import pytesseract

from PIL import Image

from pdfminer.high_level import extract_text

from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter

def ocr_image_to_text(image_path):

    """

    This is to initiate OCR on an image and fetches extracted text

    """

    try:

        text = pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open(image_path))

        return text

    except Exception as e:

        print(f"Error processing image {image_path}: {e}")

        return ""

def save_text_to_pdf(text, pdf_path):

    """

    This saves the extracted text to a new file

    """

    try:

        c = canvas.Canvas(pdf_path, pagesize=letter)

        c.drawString(100, 750, text)

        c.save()

        print(f"Text successfully saved to {pdf_path}")

    except Exception as e:

        print(f"Error saving text to PDF: {e}")

# This is a sample for you

image_path = 'scanned_document.png'  # Specify where you would want the saved files to be

pdf_path = 'extracted_text.pdf'  # Path of the new file

# Initiate OCR, create a new file with the extracted text, and save the file

extracted_text = ocr_image_to_text(image_path)

save_text_to_pdf(extracted_text, pdf_path)

Time to start effective document management!

In this blog post, we explained how document management is vital for your organization and how document scanning is pivotal for document management. Document scanners are slowly becoming an irreplaceable tool for organizations considering the rapid pace at how organizations are embracing the shift to digital documents. Let us know how you used the Python script we provided and any improvements you made.