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Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

scanyourpdf.com

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Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#72

Post by nomel »

dkonofalski wrote: post #13

I can't believe that I'm saying this but this is soooo needed. It's ridiculous to me how many organizations still require hand-signed copies as if that is somehow a deterrent to anything.

Related, I was once applying for an apartment lease. I had entered an incorrect value on some field on one of the forms. The kind person emailed me the form pointing out the mistake and told me I would have to fix it before they could accept the application and would have to come back in.

Not wanting to drive a few hours, I exported the unsigned pdf as images, quickly made the fix, converted it back pdf, and sent it away with a message saying not to worry, I fixed the problem.

Then communication ceased. I couldn’t get a reply. When I called, they put me on hold and said they were no longer taking applications (they claimed many units were available before).

I like to think the pristine color and noise matching, from my especially mediocre photoshop skill, was too convincing, and made them worry.

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#73

Post by bargle0 »

WalterBright wrote: post #48
jjoonathan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the "book simulation" features I've seen (background textures, page turn animations, the like) have come across as gimmicky and useless, meanwhile digital books tend to still suffer from conceptually simple formatting problems like poor responsive text reflow or baking detailed vector figures into tiny JPEGs. I'd settle for "too perfect" in a heartbeat.

I've sent many suggestions to the Kindle people of things they could improve on the Kindle, all of which were very simple to do. The years go by, they've done exactly 0 of them. One of them, for example, was an option to eliminate the margin in a pdf display. The pdf already has a margin, so there's the pdf margin plus the margin the ereader puts around the pdf. This significantly reduces the number of pixels display…

Making PDF display better doesn't make them any money.

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#75

Post by baicunko »

lewiscollard wrote: post #56
baicunko wrote: post #46

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…

thanks! took me quite a while to prepare as I read a bunch of other servers failing catastrophically when posting on HN due to the sheer amount of traffic.

I will start working on your comments throughout the weekend, I agree with most of them. Would love for you to follow the github page for any other comments you may have, all are appreciated

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#76

Post by [deleted] »

baicunko wrote: 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!

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#77

Post by thanksforfish »

Havoc wrote: post #74

What are the legitimate uses of this? The only uses I can think of are less than kosher.

Maybe you are at home and you need to sign something, but you don't have a printer and scanner because its 2020 and those are seldom needed. You can use this and move on with your life, or drive to a Kinkos or other place that will let you print and scan for a small fee. The latter may be a waste of time.

Wait, what less than kosher method were you thinking?

Re: Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

#78

Post by jmwilson »

From the github repo, the site is a wrapper around exactly two shell commands. Instead of uploading your data to an untrusted site, you can run from the comfort and safety of your local computer:

  convert -density 150 input.pdf -colorspace gray -linear-stretch 3.5%x10% -blur 0x0.5 -attenuate 0.25 +noise Gaussian -rotate 0.5 temp.pdf
  gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOCACHE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=LeaveColorUnchanged dAutoFilterColorImages=true -dAutoFilterGrayImages=true -dDownsampleMonoImages=true -dDownsampleGrayImages=true -dDownsampleColorImages=true -sOutputFile=output.pdf temp.pdf
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