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Home PDF routing / filing software

bsobel

Moderator Emeritus<br>Elite Member
Im looking for something that will take a bunch of PDF files (with text) in a directory and sort them based on rules applied to the text (e.g. AT&T bills get moved to this directory, Sprint to this directory, etc).

I keep finding corporate document routing systems, but there must be something outthere at the prosumer level, any suggestions?
 
I seem to recall that you're a pretty technically inclined person, though I don't recall if that extends to scripting / programming.

Under windows I'd probably just do it in powershell scripting or install cygwin (linux like utilities) or run a small LINUX
distribution in a virtual machine. It should take all of a few dozen lines of scripting in BASH or Powershell or PERL
or similar languages to do what you want.

Since the mechanisms (regular expressions and pattern matching filters) to define your documents categorically
are totally specific to your needs, it seems unlikely that manually customizing any off the shelf search / workflow /
file management tool will be any less work than just writing the scripts yourself.

I'd imagine that something like google desktop search or other integrated search products could be configured to
categorically sort and present your content, though it may not do it by actually "moving" it to any given directory,
it'll just present a "view" of your matching content based on its metadata and contents and so on.

You may be able to simplify or obviate the content analysis by being smarter and handling things differently at a different
stage of the workflow, i.e. rather than sort out PDF content to try to identify a sprint bill, why not look for solutions to
have the sprint invoices emailed to a particular account whose mail client automatically filters the messages by
virtue of the sender (sprint.com or whatever), the recipient account name (bsobel+mysprintbills@yahoo.com) or so on.
Once your email user agent can identify the uniqueness of the sender or recipient or subject or so on you can probably
just have it save the messages / attachments for those types of messages in a specific folder or call a specific processing
program to handle them etc. (typically many of the more advanced mail clients or automatic mail processing tools have
filters such that you can define certain actions or external processing programs like spam filters, anti virus, sorting, redirecting, filing, etc. based on the message).

For web fetched stuff consider using one of the automatic web fetching / automation tools to automatically download
your invoices or whatever periodically and then it'll know which one it is downloading and of course it can file it accordingly.

If you're searching content on your system, consider doing searches based on filename, or some kind of grep / awk /
regex match on the content for keywords, or of course metadata in any enclosing email body.

 
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