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

comments (10)

• 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

  wan888888 17h 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.

  mysterydip 17h 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. It looks highly realistic.

  kccqzy 16h ago

• Reminds me of this: https://github.com/erstazi/falsisign

  Adds your signature and makes it look scanned. Previously discussed on HN. Came in handy once in a while.

  svl7 7h ago

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

  carsonye 17h 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.

  echoangle 17h ago

• But… does it look scanned? https://i.imgur.com/ENKZV7s.png

  janoelze 15h ago

• It's pretty good, but there seem to be some similar products on the market that can convert locally without uploading.

  Phoenixhq 10h ago

• This has been working for me

  https://lookscanned.io/en/scan

  recroad 11h 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.

  sublinear 16h ago