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Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

scanyourpdf.com

61–70 of 177 posts

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#61
post #5
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 do you mean "required"? Like, they wouldn't accept a clean, non-scanned copy? That's absurd.

Some types of documents/deeds do require "wet ink" signatures by law - https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/support-services/advice/articl...

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#64
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought github had hooks for this kind of thing now? I remember it caught a private key I tried to push to a similar django repo (not for a prod site or anything), and that was about 2 years ago

I think this only works for secret keys that have a certain pattern like AWS keys.

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#66
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually sign documents on my iPad but in this case they told me the signature had to be from a pen. COVID and everything means I don't have a printer nor a scanner at home so I developed this to "scan my iPad signed documents" worked like a charm!

As a technological toy, I think this sort of thing is cool. In fact, you can do it in LaTeX pretty easily: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/94523/simulate-a-sca... It's interesting that the problem they had was with the signature. You can very easily make a handwritten signature on an iPad. I don't see how there's any practical way to tell the difference between a high-quality, handwritten signature done on an…

> you can do it in LaTeX pretty easily: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/94523/simulate-a-sca...

Ironically, despite being hosted on tex.stackexchange.com, all of the answers use ImageMagick, Photoshop, or Windows 10/Adobe Acrobat.

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I manually modified the private key on the server before publishing here. Still learning on ENV VARIABLES and I couldn't make them work!

You might want to just switch to a dotenv library. Quick Google for Django yielded https://github.com/jpadilla/django-dotenv

Dotenv libraries are just for dev and other similar environments. In production you should still use normal environment variables (or whatever system you use to load your configuration), as dotenv files stay on the filesystem and sometimes even committed to your SCM.

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the comments. I agree with you, I will decrease how long the file is in the server (I just hit 40gb from hacker news) as well as implement rate limiting to prevent any brute force

Rate limiting (if by that you mean at the firewall or the web server) is not the way to do it. That shifts the problem somewhere else in the stack, into a place that isn't under version control in the same repository. Consider: If you moved this on to another server, would you remember to enable rate limiting there? If someone else uses your code, will they know to enable rate limiting? Rate limiting isn't a bad idea…

Or use secrets.token_urlsafe https://docs.python.org/3/library/secrets.html#secrets.token...

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#70
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.

In this case I think it’s the business auditors (pwc etc) assuring “best practices” that will satisfy the regulators and thus the regulatory auditors (Federal reserve, treasury, FDIC...).

Banks are themselves full of absurd practices but in this one tiny area I’d give them a pass.

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