Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)

https://github.com/overflowy/make-look-scanned

45•overflowy•3h ago

Comments

blopp99•2h ago

Niceee

overflowy•2h ago

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.

costabrosky•2h ago

Useful tool

mysterydip•1h ago

I’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•1h ago

This 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•1h ago

Sometimes companies demand you print/sign/scan a document.

pooploop64•1h ago

I'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.

jhbadger•1h ago

For 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•49m ago

Typically 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•36m ago

There 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•21m ago

I 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.

echoangle•1h ago

If 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•1h ago

This needs a flag to insert random blank pages

wan888888•1h ago

I'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__•28m ago

I 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.

carsonye•1h ago

Is there any good tool that does the opposite — turning scanned documents into clean PDFs? I’ve had that need recently.

colesantiago•45m ago

Thank 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.

sublinear•27m ago

In 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•22m ago

Everything can be adjusted, that mostly comes from `--paper-tone` being set too high.

kccqzy•9m ago

I 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.

DOS Library utilizing a second CPU core

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware for breach of contract

A Day with Laravel #59 – Hand-curated Laravel packages, tutorials and trends

Show HN: LoopFlow – loop engineering for Claude Code

Linux Eliminates the Strncpy API After Six Years of Work, 360 Patches

You're Accountable for the Team. You're Not in Charge of It

The UK will scan asylum seekers' faces for age checks

Trump says he no longer views Anthropic as a threat after G7 meeting

Incorrectly Generated RSA Keys: How I Learned to Recover Lost Plaintexts

Seeing the world in radio waves with the QuadRF

RFC 9958: Post-Quantum Cryptography for Engineers

Solo Founder Sales Playbook –sales tools for technical founders who hate selling

Workflow builder built with just Sandboxes

Pulse – a local dashboard for Claude Code, approve tool calls from your phone

MosaicLeaks: Can your research agent keep a secret?

The Tech Billionaire Plan to Destroy Democracy – GIL Duran – TMR [video]

'Helmsniff'; a Helm Security Scanner

Why the EU rewrote its landmark AI law

UK Home Office launches £75M 'PoliceAI' to capitalise on artificial intelligence

Scaling a Monolith to 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons

Show HN: Amiqo – a private app to text the friends you're drifting from

GPUs and RAM Are in Short Supply, but the Real Bottleneck for AI Is Electricians

Ask HN: Do you use Claude Code, Codex, or something else?

Alice. Alice Is Impatient

Cooren – I turned my family's dinner-voting app into a coordination API

Agent-Native Code Hosting

Europe's Making Fewer Cars and Lots of Them Are Chinese

World Cup tourists aren't leaving tips – and NYC restaurants are fighting back

AutoJack: A single page can RCE the host running your AI agent

A Love Story