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- Hacker News
- Basically, 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?by hk1337
- This needs a flag to insert random blank pagesby ashton314
- or make a random page the wrong orientationby molybd3num
- It's pretty good, but there seem to be some similar products on the market that can convert locally without uploading.by Phoenixhq
- 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.
by svl7 - This has been working for meby recroad
- Which shares your personal data with over 200 “partners”… thanks, but noby catoc
- But… does it look scanned? https://i.imgur.com/ENKZV7s.pngby janoelze
- You can play around with the sliders to obtain results that look more dramatic: https://cleanshot.com/share/gpfyJyJVby overflowy
- 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.by echoangle
- Is there any good tool that does the opposite — turning scanned documents into clean PDFs? I’ve had that need recently.by carsonye
- 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.
by sublinear - Everything can be adjusted, that mostly comes from `--paper-tone` being set too high.by overflowy
- 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.by mysterydip
- Sometimes companies demand you print/sign/scan a document.by laurencerowe
- 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.by nutjob2
- 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.by jhbadger
- 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.by PufPufPuf
- 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.by ktpsns
- 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.
by pooploop64 - Charles 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.
by sowbug - 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.by kccqzy
- 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
by wan888888 - 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...
by 1a527dd5 - 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.