I need a small, lightweight DMS for personal use, which is available on Linux.
Requirements:
- runs on Linux
- manages PDF
- stores documents in the file system¹ in an easily recognizable structure²
- offers a GUI (WebUI is fine, native Linux GUI as well)
- not too many dependencies (e.g. no KDE libs as I don't use KDE)
- tags, manual descriptions
- find documents by tags, name, date, description
Strongly preferred:
- available via standard repositories (Debian/Ubungu/Mint) or at least easy to install
- OCR capabilities (for full-text search), or at least offering full text search for documents having text (for PDF, e.g. integrated via pdfsandwich; for LibreOffice, extracted from the document)
Nice to have:
- maintains other formats (images, ODF (LibreOffice/OpenOffice) documents)
- integrated document viewer capable to deal with supported formats
- scan folders for (new) documents (so I can drop them in the right place and the DMS indexes them). A special "drop folder" is OK, but even better if I can place the documents where they belong. The folder(s) don't need to be monitored; manually triggering the index process is totally fine.
- custom fields
- grouping of connected documents (think of "book series" having multiple volumes). This could e.g. also be achieved by attaching/merging multiple documents onto/into a single record.
Using a database backend for metadata is fine (it it does, preferably SQLite or MySQL).
Not needed:
- multi-user, approvals etc. (as pointed out above: personal use only)
- Windows compatibility
- "reference systems". I just need to manage my own documents. References between those are fine – but I'm not collecting external references.
- encrypted storage (if that's needed, I can encrypt the file system)
Definitely unwanted:
- cloud-based (unless self-hosted) – so no Evernote, please.
I know we have quite a few DMS questions, but none of them completely meets my requirements. Most of them are asking for collaborative features, but I only want a light-weight variant for personal use. Coming close (and how they miss):
- Free document management system with file system integration: .NET, MSSQLServer, other MS related, eMail updates
- PDF organizer with virtual hierarchy, fast viewer, highlighting, search: rather looks for a reference system
- Free software document management: automated processing, email, mirrors
- Document manager for paperless office: Windows
- Simple open source document scan/tag/catalog more lightweight than Alfresco: very close; but no FOSS, no OCR
I've also seen paperless which basically fits the above, but seems pretty complex to install. Zotero is already mentioned in the footnotes; but in addition to that it's rather for reference management.
¹ should the software die, I still can find and access the documents
² e.g. Zotero fails this one, using cryptic directory names
pdfgrep
for search. Not elegant, but does the job :)