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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I 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”.

Yes. 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.

or make a random page the wrong orientation

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.

Yeah 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/25c8632e15d17c83a54602f6ac...

check out ilovepdf (https://www.ilovepdf.com/) not OSS (?) but it's free

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

You can play around with the sliders to obtain results that look more dramatic: https://cleanshot.com/share/gpfyJyJV