openpaperwork
Android viewer
I've won an Android tablet during a programming competition. Now I need something useful to do with it. I guess porting Paperwork is the logical choice.
- Gtk is not available on Android --> a specific frontend will have to be made
- Scanners and printers are not (yet) available on Android. So this will just be a viewer
The hard part: Getting the dependency to work on Android. Afaik, most Gobject introspection won't be avaible ... this won't be easy.
Update (2016/12/06): Would also be strongly wishable: encryption
I have a feeling it would be easier to actually run Debian on my tablet ... :)
You could use the camera instead of a scanner. The quality will be worse, but it may not be a problem. Kivy looks promising for a python UI, and is multiplateform.
Dependencies:
- PIL/Pillow: There is already a recipe to compile PIL included in python-for-android
- Whoosh : Whoosh is pure python. It shouldn't be much of a problem
- Nltk : Nltk seems to be also pure python.
- Libpoppler is the hardest : It is a C++ library. Currently it is accessed through Gobject introspection. However, GObject introspection depends on the Glib.
All the other dependencies can be made optional.
In the end, using Libpoppler on Android will probably end up being a big mess. It would probably be easier to make a recipe for http://www.mupdf.com/ + use ctypes
- Gtk is not available on Android --> a specific frontend will have to be made we should not use Gobject/glib in backend, and use http://effbot.org/imagingbook/format-pdf.htm , anyway, we could have many format backend with smart depedancies.
- Scanners and printers are not (yet) available on Android. So this will just be a viewer => RESTful API https://github.com/jflesch/paperwork/issues/265 and js UI would solve both : you could have paperwork backend running on a host and connect it through webbrowser.
you could have paperwork backend running on a host and connect it through webbrowser.
Definitively not what I had in mind or even what I want. What I want here is a Paperwork instance running on Android, with all the data stored on the devices itself.
Some papers are received by mail, so paperwork on android should be able to import existing documents even without scanners or printers.
This ticket is about a viewer only. I'll see later to extend its functionalities.
Kschwank has started working on one (Java): https://github.com/kschwank/paperwork-viewer
In case someone is interested, I wrote a Web viewer, and I checked that it renders well on my Android phone: http://yalis.fr/cms/index.php/post/2016/01/21/Command-line-and-Web-Interface-for-Paperwork Cheers,
@kschwank started to work on an Android viewer a while ago. However, I'm not sure if he still intend to work on it.
Also, it's pure Java and therefore cannot use paperwork-backend. If the backend part evolves, it would have to keep up.
I would really prefer an implementation made in Python as much as possible (see Pyjnius and friends)
Support for encryption would also be a really good thing. Android can encrypt all the data of the users, but it makes the devices really slow. Just having Paperwork's documents encrypted would be safe enough and good to have.
I had a look at various benchmarks and tried it myself. While encryption makes the disk access slower, it does not seem to be really visible to the user. --> Android's encryption will be good enough --> Less work for Paperwork for Android :-)
Unrelated to the viewer : https://github.com/ctodobom/OpenNoteScanner demonstrates some really interesting algorithms. Maybe phone cameras could actually be used reliably as paper scanners.
Note to myself: http://modrana.org/pyconpl2013/python_and_qt_for_android.pdf