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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

This has been working for me

https://lookscanned.io/en/scan

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.

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

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

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.

This needs a flag to insert random blank pages

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?

cool idea, looks sooo realistic

Useful tool

Niceee

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.

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Great idea