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Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

scanyourpdf.com

21–30 of 177 posts

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#21
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banks that need monthly financials to assure regulators that they are servicing their loans are also required to justify the documents to the regulator. If you just autogenerated it perhaps they’re wrong or falsified. While if you have to take out a pen and sign them that won’t happen. Yes, absurd.

That's beyond absurd. The content of the document is what determines whether it's falsified or not, and you can inspect the content for inconsistencies on a generated PDF far more easily than a scanned one.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#22
post #2

I recently came across a couple of institutions which required me to print, sign and send back a couple of documents. COVID and all of that means I don't have a printer at home. I made this website by inspiration from other posts here and now it's free to use! Code is open source so feel free to comment any new ideas or things you would like includede!

What a great technology solution for a very non technical ... sort of luddite-ish introduced problem.

As others noted a before and after pic would be great.

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#25
post #6
post #4

Haha, great job. There's also something to be said for the grim humour of how technology led us to this point. Sadly, I'd also be extremely wary of sending the kind of documents that I need to print out and sign through some server-side black box.

Thanks, I totally agree. That's why I made the code public so you can see what's being run. A friend very privacy-minded told me maybe a desktop app could be used by those who don't want to upload their documents so that's something I'm currently exploring

This is very cool, I have the same concern. Most documents I need to scan like this have my PHI or PII on them and I wouldn't trust uploading to a third party, and especially free, site. What I will add to the conversation is that seeing the source code and trusting that you're running that exact code are different thing. Would love to see this as something I could run locally after cloning the repo, as a python or npm script or some. Very cool work overall!

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#28
Not to detract from this, because it is brilliant, and I'll definitely use in the future as a last resort.

Before resorting to this, I've found that if I convert the PDF to an image, and send it as a TIFF file, that is usually what the organization's people are looking for. I haven't had to do that for years now.

On the extremely rare occasions someone asks if I signed it on "real paper" (lol), I say with a straight face, "yep, I'm a computer guy, I have a really good scanner and image software". I do. It's just gathering dust. Last time that happened was about 5 years ago.

Over 20 years ago, I wrote my signature in thick, black Sharpie across an entire letter-sized, landscape-orientation page, scanned it with the highest resolution scanner I could cadge at the time (600 dpi, wooo!), laboriously cleaned it up, added an alpha channel, then even more laboriously vectorized it. Ever since then, dropping my signature into PDF's has worked except for those situations where a physical, wet-signed notarized document was required.

At first I took to the trouble to convert the resultant PDF into TIFFs and digitally sign them. Then with some experimentation I found that flattened and stripped PDFs without the digital signature were accepted without comment. Further experimentation revealed to me that only developers like us could even tell the difference, and plain PDF's where I dropped the signature into them are accepted these days.

Now, I use an Acrobat DC stamp that I converted from the vectorized form, and haven't touched the old bitmap or vectorized versions in years. Ironically, the most secure option of digital signatures gave me the most problems.

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#29

Edit: fixed now. Original: Please don't upload any private or confidential pdfs right now. I emailed OP two security concerns that trivially allow anybody to see any of the converted pdfs.

Fixed. Sorry, forgot to configure nginx.

isn't this a problem? https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf/blob/master/convertp...

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#30
post #2

I recently came across a couple of institutions which required me to print, sign and send back a couple of documents. COVID and all of that means I don't have a printer at home. I made this website by inspiration from other posts here and now it's free to use! Code is open source so feel free to comment any new ideas or things you would like includede!

it occurs to me that you could do this with a lower tech method, just sign your name on a piece of scotch tape and align the tape on the monitor over the document, take a photo with your phone and then use that as the 'scanned image' in the pdf file.
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