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Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
I made this because the online "make my PDF look scanned" tools want you to upload your file to their servers, which feels sketchy at best. Also, I wasn't happy with the output they produce, I wanted something that looks realistic.
- blopp99 4mo agoNiceee
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- costabrosky 4mo agoUseful tool
- mysterydip 4mo agoI’m all for fun side projects, so don’t take this the wrong way. Does this have a practical use case? Like are people actually wanting to make their PDFs less legible? Usually I’m trying to do the opposite, clean up my scanned-in documents.
- ktpsns 4mo agoThis is in fact useful for people who demand you to print out and sign contracts. Did so many times in the past, using some ghostscript+imagemagick scripting to avoid the cargo culturing.
- laurencerowe 4mo agoSometimes companies demand you print/sign/scan a document.
- pooploop64 4mo agoI've been in situations where I had to supply a digital version of a signed document but the person asking for it required that it be physically printed off to be signed and then scanned back in. Some policy thing. I think it would technically be fraud to use this but that's one use I thought of. The description however seems like the creator just likes how scanned documents look. They describe it like how analogue music fans describe vinyl records. I guess everything is nostalgic to someone out there eventually.
- monkpit 4mo agoHow is it fraud? Who is being defrauded? What is the impact to the victim?
- jhbadger 4mo agoFor some value of practical, I could see it being useful in making handouts for an RPG where the handout is supposed to be a photocopy of a section of some rare book the players need to scan for clues.
- nutjob2 4mo agoTypically when I send a form I will do as much as possible in a PDF editor, including the signature. Most of the world is in denial about how electronic documents, especially scanned ones, work, so you have to play along to stop them from getting upset.
- BrandoElFollito 4mo agoThere are countries such as France that request plenty of nonsensical handwriting with some weird also handwritten formulas. This comes from the times where graphology was a big thing in France (you would usually be required to send a handwritten letter of motivation). Poland is also strong on that, requiring "readable handwritten signatures". This will end when the dinosaurs that still feel it is important go away.
- PufPufPuf 4mo agoI was actually required in the past to "print, sign and scan", and due to my lack of a printer I just took a picture of my signature and pasted it in. Nobody ever complained, but if they did, I imagine I'd rather use something like this than go to a copycenter to print a single sheet of paper to satisfy some arbitrary requirement.
- gsinclair 4mo agoI sometimes want to create PDFs that contain text (Python code) that is not selectable. I want my students to type it in, not copy and paste. I don’t know whether this tool enables that, but the idea is in the neighbourhood of “make it look scanned”.
- carstenhag 4mo agoiOS will natively let you select the text, as it does ocr on ever image. Maybe Android does the same.
- 1e1a 4mo agoMacOS does this as well in Preview.
- digitaltrees 4mo agoYes. Fraud. It makes a document look like it existed in physical form. Imagine for example a purchase agreement for a house that was physically scanned. You could change the signature to a different name and then make it look like it was original. I am not asserting the authors intent is to facilitate fraud or there isn’t any other practical use, but let’s not be naive and act like fraud isn’t a likely use. Before you downvote at least respond with why you think my analysis is wrong.
- bluebarbet 4mo agoIt's not that you're wrong, but the fact that it would be fraud is farcical and needs to be challenged. My bank demands that I perform this ridiculous hoop-jumping. Like others here, I use ImageMagick hocus pocus to defeat them with trivial ease (a couple of times they complained so I tweaked the algo a bit and they were happy). The whole situation is beyond absurd. It's security theater in place of security.
- digitaltrees 4mo agoThis is fraud. Your are passing off a document as authentic by misleading use of visual artifacts to make the origin of the document appear different than reality. Just because you don’t like the security theatre does make it acceptable to misrepresent the origin of a document to satisfy the security requirements. And I gave a specific example, slipping a page into a document that wasn’t in the original and making it look like it belongs by making it look scanned. Imagine I changed the purchase price on your home to 10% of its value rather than the original agreed price and took it to court to enforce the purchase. This tech would make that appear more credible.
- falsemyrmidon 4mo agoYou could just as easily edit it, print it, then scan it again. This tech doesn't enable you to do anything you couldn't already do. The real problem is that written signatures are a poor form of authentication.
- sowbug 4mo agoCharles Schwab, the brokerage, didn't like that my signed form retitling an account looked too perfect (I had scanned my signature and then inserted the JPEG into their PDF form, which is absolutely 100% legal as a signature). So I printed the form out and sent them a picture of the printout. They didn't like that, either. So I moved my money out of the account. That worked fine.
- Symbiote 4mo agoWhat were they expecting? A letter sent by mail?
- embedding-shape 4mo agoBunch of places want it to "look like" you've printed the page, then signed it, then scanned it. If it doesn't "look like" that, they won't accept it. Makes no sense, but I've also encountered it a bunch of times myself too.
- sowbug 4mo agoThat's right. This requirement makes a little sense if you don't actually know the signer and could conceivably end up in court with a forensic handwriting analyst testifying whether the signature was a forgery. Anything involving notarization, for example, should pass that analysis. But for the other 99.99% of signatures in the world, any mark at all is fine, and insisting on more is wasteful bureaucracy.
- bcraven 4mo agoThey're called "wet signatures" "However, many jurisdictions still require a wet signature. For instance, in the US and Canada, notarized documents require signatures in wet ink. Similarly, documents in areas such as family law, wills, trusts, or banking also require physical signatures. In the UK, tax authorities require a wet signature for any tax documents filed by a British resident." https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/business/resources/wet-signature.html#when-do-you-need-a-wet-signature https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/business/resources/wet-signatu...
- echoangle 4mo agoIf you’re interested in another suggestion: maybe allow image output too since that seems to be one of the steps in your pipeline? Maybe for some people using the jpg or a png directly is better than the final pdf.
- ashton314 4mo agoThis needs a flag to insert random blank pages
- molybd3num 4mo agoor make a random page the wrong orientation
- wan888888 4mo agoI'm having a similar use case from time to time, I just use imagemagick magick -density 150 input.pdf \ -colorspace Gray \ -virtual-pixel White -background White \ -rotate 0.7 +repage \ -attenuate 0.45 +noise Gaussian \ -blur 0x0.4 \ -brightness-contrast -5x12 \ -compress jpeg -quality 78 scanned.pdf
- __mharrison__ 4mo agoI have something similar. Someone asked for a signed PDF. I digitally signed it and sent it to them. They said it has to be scanned. So I did some image magic fu to it to rotate it and make it look crappy. Then they accepted it.
- nashashmi 4mo agoMy goto technique: apply signature stamp. Flatten. Change blend mode to multiply. Convert page to image. Rotate image by 0.5 deg. Paste scanned page on tape. Flatten. Change blend mode of image to burn or multiply. Convert to image. The only tell tale sign is that the text still has this aliasing like texture that doesn’t happen in real scanned pages.
- 1a527dd5 4mo agoYeah I don't want to rain on OPs parade; but this is already a solved problem: From my bookmarks (found on HN originally!) https://gist.github.com/andyrbell/25c8632e15d17c83a54602f6acde2724 https://gist.github.com/andyrbell/25c8632e15d17c83a54602f6ac...
- carsonye 4mo agoIs there any good tool that does the opposite — turning scanned documents into clean PDFs? I’ve had that need recently.
- colesantiago 4mo agoThank you for making this a free tool. There are too many PDF tools that are unnecessarily paywalled, or have a paid tier that don't make any sense. We need more tools from paid ones that should be completely free and OSS.
- molybd3num 4mo agocheck out ilovepdf (https://www.ilovepdf.com/ https://www.ilovepdf.com/) not OSS (?) but it's free
- normie3000 4mo agoDo you have to upload your documents to their server?
- molybd3num 4mo agoooh yeah you have to, forgot about that
- sublinear 4mo agoIn the example image, the edge gradient bevels give it away. There might be extra stuff that can be done to remedy that with this tool, but I'm not sure I'd ever use this anyway.
- overflowy 4mo agoEverything can be adjusted, that mostly comes from `--paper-tone` being set too high.
- kccqzy 4mo agoI just display the PDF on my monitor and use my phone to take a photo of it. Scanner apps are good at eliminating moire patterns while accentuating the dust on my monitor. It looks highly realistic.
- booleandilemma 4mo ago[dead]
- huflungdung 4mo ago[dead]
- janoelze 4mo agoBut… does it look scanned? https://i.imgur.com/ENKZV7s.png https://i.imgur.com/ENKZV7s.png
- overflowy 4mo agoYou can play around with the sliders to obtain results that look more dramatic: https://cleanshot.com/share/gpfyJyJV https://cleanshot.com/share/gpfyJyJV
- sprobertson 4mo agoMuch better than your current demo image! The default vignette is too obviously digital
- Rajikshank 4mo agoGreat idea
- Cbagenal 4mo agocool idea, looks sooo realistic
- hk1337 4mo agoBasically, you’re converting it to an image-based PDF so they cannot just scrape the text off of it but would have to use OCR?
- recroad 4mo agoThis has been working for me https://lookscanned.io/en/scan https://lookscanned.io/en/scan
- catoc 4mo agoWhich shares your personal data with over 200 “partners”… thanks, but no
- Phoenixhq 4mo agoIt's pretty good, but there seem to be some similar products on the market that can convert locally without uploading.
- svl7 4mo agoReminds me of this: https://github.com/erstazi/falsisign https://github.com/erstazi/falsisign Adds your signature and makes it look scanned. Previously discussed on HN. Came in handy once in a while.