Panopticon

What is Panopticon?

Panopticon is a desktop application for managing and searching through PDF documents with advanced text extraction and bookmarking capabilities. At present, it remains very much a work in progress.

Features

• Intelligent search across thousands of PDF pages
• Text extraction using OCR on your device
• Bookmarking capabilities for quick access to important pages
• Real-time file system monitoring
• Local storage: all data kept in documents/Panopticon (settings, Python environment, saved searches) and within your library directories (processed indexes)

Why was it built?

Singapore's building code documents are overwhelmingly in PDF format, which makes searching for specific information rather like looking for a needle in a particularly bureaucratic haystack. I built Panopticon to cut through this inefficiency, creating a search tool capable of handling substantial document libraries with ease. It saves time, certainly, but more importantly, it preserves one's sanity when the alternative is another afternoon lost to endless scrolling.

What's with the name?

The name "Panopticon" comes from Jeremy Bentham's architectural idea: a single vantage point from which everything becomes visible at once. Foucault saw in this a rather grim metaphor for surveillance and control. I see something simpler and rather more useful: the ability to survey vast territories of information from one place. Your documents, which might otherwise scatter their knowledge across thousands of pages and dozens of files, are suddenly within view. What began as a design for watching people becomes a tool for understanding what you own. The difference, happily, is that your PDFs contain answers rather than prisoners, and they are considerably more forthcoming when questioned.

Screenshots