I would pay for a foss paperless ngx fork with support for running in a readonly filesystem of arbitrary file structure, and giving me full text search with ocr for images, pdfs, and ideally descriptions of video files

As someone who is adding SSO to B2C apps, are you an LDAP or nothing kind of person or would you consider things with OIDC/OAuth integration too?

LDAP is such a pain in the ass to integrate with, and it seems like most things are going OIDC these days.

Everything for the document (fonts, images, etc) are all stored within the document file. It's entirely self-contained.

Among other things, it usually means that the file type has wide interoperability (which makes it more likely you can open it in the far future) and comes in a format resistant to damage, so if bits are changed or removed, you can still recover the rest of the document (usually this means avoiding compressed formats). As to how well-suited PDF/A is for these aspects, I'm not experienced enough to say.

Go ahead man, manually install and configure redis, mariadb, gotenberg, and tika to see if you like the software. It's a free country.

Not a general purpose one really, but it is a document management system. It's aimed at incoming mail. You get automatic OCR and learned classification / tagging / date finding.

And "docker compose up" is the easiest way to deploy things these days in general. That's got nothing to do with this software specifically.

> After scanning a document, how is it different than any other document I have as a file (other than it being not-very-editable)?

You don't want to use paperless-ngx for editable stuff really. You want to use it for stuff like bills, invoices, and business records.

Once it's in paperless, it's searchable and you don't have to worry about where it is. As long as the scan is good it will grab the OCR and then you can search for things like account number. My uncle basically scans everything bill related into his instance and then shreds the paper.

You can also tag documents and search by tag. Also since it's a web app if you can do the self-hosted thing it works well on the phone.

I have my printer set to scan and save the files to a NFS. Paperless-NGX picks it from there, does OCR and saves it. I guess I could just leave it on the NFS, but I do like the UI of P-NGX.