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96 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
96 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: docs
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title: Documentation
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---
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# {{page.title}}
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This is the documentation for Docspell @VERSION@. There is a
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[changelog](changelog).
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Docspell assists in organizing large amounts of PDF files that are
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typically scanned paper documents. You can associate tags, set
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correspondends, what a document is concerned with, a name, a date and
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some more. If your documents are associated with this meta data, you
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should be able to quickly find them later using the search
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feature. But adding this manually to each document is a tedious
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task. What if most of it could be attached automatically?
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## How it works
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Documents have two main properties: a correspondent (sender or
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receiver that is not you) and something the document is about. Usually
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it is about a person or some thing – maybe your car, or contracts
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concerning some familiy member, etc.
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1. You maintain a kind of address book. It should list all possible
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correspondents and the concerning people/things. This grows
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incrementally with each new unknown document.
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2. When docspell analyzes a document, it tries to find matches within
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your address book. It can detect the correspondent and a concerning
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person or thing. It will then associate this data to your
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documents.
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3. You can inspect what docspell has done and correct it. If docspell
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has found multiple suggestions, they will be shown for you to
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select one. If it is not correctly associated, very often the
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correct one is just one click away.
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The set of meta data that docspell uses to draw suggestions from, must
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be maintained manually. But usually, this data doesn't grow as fast as
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the documents. After a while there is a quite complete address book
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and only once in a while it has to be revisited.
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Besides extracting the text from documents to analyze, docspell also
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converts all files into PDF files. This unifies the different formats
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your documents may be in originally and makes them more accessible
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from other systems and the future.
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## Terms
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In order to better understand these pages, some terms should be
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explained first.
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### Item
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An **Item** is roughly your (pdf) document, only that an item may span
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multiple files, which are called **attachments**. And an item has
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**meta data** associated:
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- a **correspondent**: the other side of the communication. It can be
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an organization or a person.
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- a **concerning person** or **equipment**: a person or thing that
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this item is about. Maybe it is an insurance contract about your
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car.
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- **tag**: an item can be tagged with custom tags. A tag can have a
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*category*. This is intended for grouping tags, for example a
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category `doctype` could be used to group tags like `bill`,
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`contract`, `receipt` etc. Usually an item is not tagged with more
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than one tag of a category.
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- a **item date**: this is the date of the document – if this is not
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set, the created date of the item is used.
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- a **due date**: an optional date indicating that something has to be
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done (e.g. paying a bill, submitting it) about this item until this
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date
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- a **direction**: one of "incoming" or "outgoing"
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- a **name**: some item name, defaults to the file name of the
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attachments
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- some **notes**: arbitrary descriptive text. You can use markdown
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here, which is appropriately formatted in the web application.
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### Collective
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The users of the application are part of a **collective**. A
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**collective** is a group of users that share access to the same
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items. The account name is therefore comprised of a *collective name*
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and a *user name*.
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All users of a collective are equal; they have same permissions to
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access all items. The items don't belong to a user, but to the
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collective.
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That means, to identify yourself when signing in, you have to give the
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collective name and your user name. By default it is separated by a
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slash `/`, for example `smith/john`. If your user name is the same as
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the collective name, you can omit one; so `smith/smith` can be
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abbreviated to just `smith`.
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