The Linklet Project: A Solution to Your Documentation Needs

Abstract

This paper describes about a solution to your pdf and documentation needs on you mobile phone. This is a paper on a mobile app created by Aastha Bhatt, Hrishikesh Kavale, Aditya Pandey and Sunny Manjrekar as our final year project. The name of the app is LINKLET. Converting images to pdf or excel to pdf, scanning of barcodes for invoices or merging or removing pages from pdf is never an easy task. And even if we somehow manage to pull it off the accuracy of such systems is questionable, then again all applications which provide such features are paid. The problem faced by us students during the online system of education is what sparked this project, we were required to scan our assignments, convert them into pdf , receive pdfs from our teachers and modify them or add our documents to them, etc and though all of this is easy on a computer not all students have access to it. Also it is a hassle to search our important documents in the download folder of our phone and present it when required on the spot. So as a solution we have created an app which provides major features like merging of pdf, extract images from pdf, convert pdf to image and image to pdf ,etc. Also providing a feature to store all our important documents in a single place for handy access along with security features like finger print lock. The aim was to create a handy tool for the students to ease their work and an app for everyone to carry their important documents around in a safe and secure manner ready to present when asked by officials anytime anywhere without having the need to carry it on person. The approach we took for this project was a simple one. We asked ourselves and our peers as to what problems we are facing , looked up for online solutions , developed the application by referring various tutorials. The experimental results of the app evidently demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

At present PDF has become a critical tool in our life, to store important documents, publications , e-books ,etc. It is a widely used format and an official format for various documents because of its reliability. When you create a PDF file containing any amount of data like paragraphs or images, tables,etc. it will always display that data in the exact same way on all devices.

PDF files cannot be altered the way word files do as it is designed for more sensitive correspondence which makes it the most suitable file format.

Extracting images out of a PDF or converting images to PDF is never an easy task and so is merging of PDF’s. Editing PDF’s in any form is a challenge in itself . Most of the softwares  which enable us to do these operations are costly and the freeware is unreliable and have poor performance.

Secondly much of our lives revolve around our phone. Our phone is a powerful device which has all our important data. But often this data is lost in the ever increasing flow of data. We often have to spend time scrolling through our phone trying to find an important document whose name you have forgotten .

Good document management is a critical component in everyone's life and in fact, it might be the most important part – because it’s the repository where all of the objective evidence and proof surrounding an organization’s products are housed.

When people don’t know when or how or what to do to formalize documentation practices, it can cause enormous amounts of confusion in the long run. Humans

often end up housing and maintaining documents on their hard drives, or resort to setting up a cloud storage to share files, but those places just become dump stations for "stuff" and random documents.

One of the biggest failures that arise from improper document management is the loss or misplacement of documents. Without an effective system, physical documents can be lost or destroyed in numerous ways.

And add the urgency to submit a document to the above-mentioned problems and you get just chaos.

We therefore take the initiative to propose LINKLET, a one stop solution to your pdf needs and a place to store all your important documents to present them when needed.

II. RELATED WORKS

Many freeware softwares that perform image to pdf and pdf to image conversions, merging of pdf, etc. are available for download in the market today, most of which work well depending on the intended use. In our case our focus was on how well these tools perform on our app and help us to provide these services to users.

These softwares are mostly paid  or if free exist as different individual websites. There are very few applications to provide these services to us.

Benefits over conventional methods:-

1. No need to download multiple apps.
2. No need to keep on jumping between sites.
3. Improved security

III.  FEATURES

Following are some of the features provided by our app:-

1. Recently Used Features: We put a view to display the recently used features by the user so that the user can reuse the features without having to scroll down again and again

2. Image To PDF: We added a image to pdf convertor which allows you to select images from your gallery or click the image and convert it to a pdf also allowing you to give it any name you want and  put various filters on it.

3. View Files: The view file option opens only the LINKLET folder on your device which stores all the files created by the application as well as any important documents that you transfer into the app using the “ + “ button

4. History: We have provided a history button to provide the user with a log of all the actions committed by the user . Now why the user would want to view a log of their actions? Well we provide the option to view history so that in case a user forgets if they have already converted a file or taken an action on the file they can always check out the log and understand the actions committed by them.

5. Password Protect: Enables the user to password protect their PDF which provides with an extra layer of security. You can also remove the password using this app

6. Add Text: This functionality allows the addition of text files to the PDF file which allows us a semi editing of the PDF document. Many other companies and organisation provides this feature at exorbitant rates but we are providing this for free.

7. Add Image: This option allows us to add new images in the PDF file and modify it. Addition of images is another important requirement of college going students and gives some flexibility to us to add images.

8. Remove Page: As the name suggests this option lets us select the pages we want to remove from the PDF .

9. Reorder Page: This option allows us to reorder the pages in the PDF

10. Fingerprint Lock: For us users security is number one priority so we have added some security features like screen lock or two-factor authentication etc. to make our app stronger.

The app opens only when you use your finger print or phone lock mechanism. Which means that all your important documents can be accessed by you and only you untill and unless you compromise your own security .

We opt to go with a fingerprint based lock as our fingerprints almost stay consistent and rarely do change hence being a reliable source of identification. The security feature is linked to your phone lock so the user has no need to put a new password or finger lock on the application rather the application automatically gets the information regarding your fingerprint and password from your device itself and uses it as your login

IV.  BASIC WORKING/ REVISION OF THE APP

This application is meant for storing our personal documents like address proof mark sheets, etc. in one place. This documents are being sorted according to the sections and categories like school, college documents, id proofs. With the help of this application we can find our documents in one go.

It will reduces the time taken to find our documents from lots of files

For us users security is number one priority so we are thinking to add some security features like screen lock or two-factor authentication etc. to make our app stronger.

The data is stored using SQLite and the basic working of the application is such that on installing the application the user is asked for storage permissions . On receiving the storage permission from the user the application creates a folder named LINKLET in the users phone internal storage.

It is in this folder that all the data that the app will work with and all the files the user wants and chooses / converts using the application and modifies using the application will be kept .

In order to let the user store their personal important documents so that they can easily access it and use in their day to day life we have implemented a small floating button which would be present on the main application screen.

This button when clicked upon will  open the phones file manager and is locked to access only the downloads folder of the phone as the important documents are mostly downloaded from the internet and incase are in the form of images or are scanned we can use the inbuilt scanner of the application.

Hence only the downloads folder will be accessed and the privacy of the user will be maintained. The user can now view the important files using the application any time.

The major advantage our application provides over other existing applications or sites is that our application is completely advertisement free so students need not bother with constant advertisements to watch when they try to convert their files or scan their files.

We provide with all the premium services such as extracting images from pdf , editing a pdf , modifying the pdf in any sort of way for free. Various available sites and solutions for the pdf needs always give these services at a very high cost and many a times users are not willing to pay that cost , the free alternatives have too many advertisments in them and the result is not always satisfactory .

Our main userbase for this project will be students and their problems with pdfs and hence our project will be developed around the problems the students face in submitting assignments or changing pdfs etc.

Conclusion

In this paper we gave a short brief knowledge about our project and our vision as to what we wished to achieve. We discussed the benefits offered by our solution over the conventional methods of PDF conversion. PDF is a very important part of our day to day life and so is its conversion and transfer, this paper sheds some light on the features made available to the user by this app which makes the life of the user easier while handling pdfs. The problems faced by students and professionals alike would be solved

References

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327992611_A_Highly_Accurate_PDF-To-Text_Conversion_System_for_Academic_Papers_Using_Natural_Language_Processing_Approach [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264623038_Barcode_Recognition_System [3] https://smallpdf.com/result#r=4e51c20f0f5937070d8d841c78c1eeaf&t=pdf-to-word [4] https://www.zamzar.com/convert/pages.zip-to-pdf/ [5] https://www.geksforgeeks.org/cardview-in-android-with-example/

Copyright

Copyright © 2022 Hrishikesh Kavale, Aastha Bhatt, Sunny Manjrekar, Aditya Pandey, Ms. Vaishali Rane. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.