Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

http://www.scanyourpdf.com

by baicunko • 6 years ago

607 168 6 years ago

baicunko26• 6 years ago

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!

newx• 6 years ago

Pretty cool idea!

One suggestion: add thumbnail/preview of how docs will look like after "scanned". Or maybe even a "Before and After" teaser! :)

baicunko26• 6 years ago

I'm adding this to the pending in GitHub, great idea

pmiller23• 6 years ago

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

baicunko26• 6 years ago

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!

gumby4• 6 years ago

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.

BillinghamJ• 6 years ago

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

duxup• 6 years ago

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.

itronitron• 6 years ago

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.

epa• 6 years ago

Who owns pens in 2020?

yipbub• 6 years ago

Taking a picture of a monitor with a will usually result in a Moire pattern[1] since the image sensors is a grid and the display pixels are grid.

Just tried this. Orienting your phone at 45 degrees to the monitor can mostly reduce them, but that's not really that useful.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern

vmception3• 6 years ago

COVID and all of that means I don't have a printer at home.

I recently felt privileged enough to get a printer at home in the workroom of my 2bd apartment in San Francisco.

And yet, it ran out of toner! The notaries wanted documents already printed! The print shops are all closed! What the deuce!

I got one to sympathize with me, she wouldn't take my flash drive, but ran out of excuses when I said I have the files on my iphone's file section and could email them.

biryani_chicken• 6 years ago

I had the same issue recently. What I did is sign a blank paper, take a pic of it with my phone and copypasted the text over the blank page with The Gimp.

jschwartzi2• 6 years ago

This is basically what Adobe Reader does with its signature feature.

dkersten• 6 years ago

I used to do that, but nowadays I tend to sign things on iPad. When using the stylus it looks exactly like it was hand signed (even without the stylus, I can just zoom way in and make it look kinda hand signed). The pdf is of course not scanned looking, but nobody had complained yet.

leethargo• 6 years ago

Suggestion: For multi-page documents, it would be nice to use slightly different rotation parameters for each page.

nicbou• 6 years ago

I am fairly close to various expat communities in my city. "Where can I print this document" is a very common question. It also affects tourists who need printed tickets that are only available a few days before their flight.

j_4• 6 years ago

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.

baicunko26• 6 years ago

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

secfirstmd2• 6 years ago

Yep an easy to download cross-platform Desktop App would be awesome. Or building it into pandoc

ganstyles• 6 years ago

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!

hunter2_2• 6 years ago

made the code public so you can see what's being run

The thing is, sharing a repository does not prove that the server is running that same code. And someone worried about their document security wouldn't run some random binary locally either, because it could send the document off to a server. They would run the source code locally after reading it, which sharing the repository allows for.

iak8god• 6 years ago

I was in need of this recently, and found that an ImageMagick one-liner can do the job quite nicely: https://gist.github.com/andyrbell/25c8632e15d17c83a54602f6ac...

secfirstmd2• 6 years ago

This is cool and would be useful from time to time with some stupid organisations that insist for some reason on full scanning.

Perhaps one suggestion. Can you update your documentation a bit to make it easier for someone to be able to implement it themselves? There's not much about that on the Github and I would guess some people would rather run their own locally.

SanchoPanda• 6 years ago

Your convert and gs mastery is truly impressive, great job and great project.

dkonofalski• 6 years ago

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.

giarc• 6 years ago

I have to submit my work hours in an excel sheet. There is a section for "Signature". I didn't put anything since it's an electronic file and my email sending the file should serve as a "signature". However, my manager insisted I use a cursive font to type out my signature.

Faaak• 6 years ago

What if your signature can't be spelled (mine doesn't mean anything, it's just random symbol) ? Ridiculous

vmception3• 6 years ago

if only there was a global pandemic that specifically targeted the legal counsel who would maintain these requirements

nomel• 6 years ago

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.

switz• 6 years ago

Impressed to see this is your first open source project! What a fantastic blend of simplicity, technology, and wit.

I love it.

Original (was PDF): https://i.imgur.com/v5nn1ql.png

Processed: https://www.scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020512_wegb.pdf

baicunko26• 6 years ago

Thank you!

xiconfjs• 6 years ago

uploaded again: https://www.scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020512_oqkk.pdf

miles6• 6 years ago

Show HN: FalsiScan – Make it look like a PDF has been hand signed and scanned (770 points, 34 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653

derwiki• 6 years ago

Thought this sounded familiar.

ladybro• 6 years ago

Genius. Nice work.

bastard_op• 6 years ago

I just edit files with masterpdf under the linux free version, and send them back with a transparent png of my signature merged. Good enough.

atum47• 6 years ago

Great you decided to share the source code, but then I was able to see that you let the admin session enabled. you can disable that on production

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4845239/how-can-i-disabl...

baicunko26• 6 years ago

Thanks! I will implement this once the traffic from HackerNews decreases a bit (server is getting totally hammered).

Still there's no admin user configured so it's safe

ArneVogel• 6 years ago

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.

baicunko26• 6 years ago

Fixed. Sorry, forgot to configure nginx.

thebigshane• 6 years ago

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

lewiscollard5• 6 years ago

It's still far short of being suitable for use of any private documents.

https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf/blob/master/pdfwebsi...

This is rather less than secure; output files are named, e.g., "Scan_2020512_{four random lower-case letters}.pdf" into a web-server-readable directory.

That gives a total of 456976 different possible filenames on a day. It's more than feasible to brute-force that many filenames in the hour before files get deleted.

OP: I don't think randomly-suffixed file names are an inherently bad way to approach this. But you should definitely consider using a longer random string, and definitely consider not using the `random` module too (it is not secure and is not intended to be).

baicunko26• 6 years ago

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

amhokies• 6 years ago

You probably shouldn't be uploading sensitive pdfs regardless.

lilblockchains• 6 years ago

That's a pretty cool project. Do you mind explaining your deployment process?

baicunko26• 6 years ago

I will include a more in-depth deployment process in Github to simplify implementing this by anyone

yourapostasy• 6 years ago

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.

doc_gunthrop• 6 years ago

It looks like what is being used for the transformation is:

1) set to grayscale (optional), 2) add blur, 3) slight rotational tilt, 4) add gaussian blur (?)

You can go one further by randomly adding tiny artifacts (ie. specks) to add even more realism. Maybe even a simulated crease in a corner.

baicunko26• 6 years ago

I will check regarding artifact. Also someone else mentioned to add random rotational tilt per page to ensure it looks more "legit"

behnamoh2• 6 years ago

To OP:

the server is down.

baicunko26• 6 years ago

Seems OK on my side. What are you seeing?

behnamoh2• 6 years ago

it works fine now.

Just one comment: maybe you could randomize the rotation angle so that all pages don't look the same.

jduckles• 6 years ago

I've extracted the oneliner command that runs this into a gist of a simple bash script. I don't want to send my PDFs to an unknown server. Also modified a bit (density and output compression) to reduce file size. https://gist.github.com/jduckles/29a7c5b0b8f91530af5ca3c22b8...

baicunko26• 6 years ago

Great idea, I will probably include your gist in the original GitHub mentioning you

WalterBright3• 6 years ago

I find that digital books are simply too perfect. There should be pdf fonts where there are maybe 10 incantations of each character, and the display:

1. picks one incantation randomly for each display 2. slightly and randomly alters the position/rotation of each character 3. adds a tiny blotch now and then

Like the print in a real book, especially ones printed before 1970.

I also suggest that the background be an actual scanned image of a blank piece of paper. Those "paper color" backgrounds are too perfect. Take some blank pages out of an older book sometime and scan them, and you'll see what I mean.

jjoonathan• 6 years ago

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.

WalterBright3• 6 years ago

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 displaying information.

undershirt• 6 years ago

i feel this, and i think i finally understand why people like vinyl static.

WalterBright3• 6 years ago

Yes. People wrongly argue that vinyl sounds are more accurate. CDs are more accurate. But CDs are perfect, and for us older folks, the sound of vinyl, with its scratches, pops, crackle, rumble, and crosstalk has a comfortable nostalgic appeal.

raldi• 6 years ago

Suggestion: Include some before/after examples

jaifraic• 6 years ago

This. I had no idea what this did until I read a couple of HN-comments. The short introduction could mean a couple of things:

Just downgrading the pdf? Looking for a signature-like part and turns this to pseduo-handwritten characters, maybe changing the color? Something completely different?

Naturally, I did not want to upload a potentially confidential document to some random webservice.

I actually had a pdf file containing several pages of "Lorem ipsum" that I needed for another thing, but I deleted it yesterday because I was done with it.

underlines• 6 years ago

Why not deleting the file after 1 download?

junga• 6 years ago

I once ran into this at work. Some (fairly old) android versions send two requests under certain circumstances. Someone else might elaborate this maybe.

baicunko26• 6 years ago

I thought someone might want to share their document with someone else. I may include in a future release a max number of downloads (i.e. 2 or 30 minutes and then delete)

gus_massa• 6 years ago

Sometimes the download fails.

pingec2• 6 years ago

Is this project different in some way from many already existing solutions that do the same?

I like that it is open source and in theory possible to self host since I really wouldn't want to upload my documents anywhere.

I would really like to know if a similar solution exists that is very easy to run locally or if it runs in the browser it does everything client-side?

baicunko26• 6 years ago

I like to think this solution is way more friendly than using terminal for 99% of people. What others have suggested is to develop a stand-alone app for more private documents which can't be sent somewhere else

pingec2• 6 years ago

I didn't mean the terminal. Typing "make pdf look like scanned" into google returns me many websites with same functionality.

fabatka• 6 years ago

Slightly related: add artificial coffee stains to LaTeX documents: http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349

morisy• 6 years ago

Only semi-related, but I thought their was an open source PDF-flowing tool featured on hacker news a while back (that turned PDF into responsive HTML). Anyone know of something like that?

Havoc• 6 years ago

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

thanksforfish• 6 years ago

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?

hunter2_2• 6 years ago

People who require "print, sign, scan" do so for the purpose of avoiding forgery, not because they benefit from any other aspect of the procedure. So long as you aren't putting someone else's signature onto the document, everything is kosher because you've deprived them of nothing given that forgery was successfully avoided.

It's like if all devices in your house have no internet connection, and your ISP support rep asks you to reboot your computer. You say "Ok it just rebooted" without rebooting because the reason for the procedure is simply to ensure that it's not an issue local to one device, and you have ensured that for them (albeit by alternative means).

jmwilson• 6 years ago

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

miles6• 6 years ago

pmiller2 linked[0] to some alternatives[1], including this one[2] which only requires ImageMagick:

convert letter.pdf -colorspace gray \( +clone -blur 0x1 \) +swap -compose divide -composite -linear-stretch 5%x0% -rotate 1.5 as-scanned.pdf

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157979

[1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/94523/simulate-a-sca...

[2] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/94541/185219

baicunko26• 6 years ago

I'd recommend GS after ImageMagick as IM will hugely increase the size of the output due to rasterization!

baicunko26• 6 years ago

In summary you could say yes but I wanted to simplify the process for the not-so-techy person. I will work on a Standalone app that simplifies the command and shows a nice GUI for more private documents

ryanwaggoner• 6 years ago

I hope you don’t take the comment you’re responding to as anything negative. I’m a software engineer and I would use this myself rather than try and remember some arcane command line utility.

gdilla• 6 years ago

i just tell people the dropbox app will scan docs for you. comes out looking like a photocopy. perfect for the bankers.

cs7022• 6 years ago

Try this one-line ImageMagick command to make COMPACT pseudo-scanned files:

  convert -density 150 ORIGINAL.pdf -colorspace gray +noise Gaussian -rotate 0.5 -depth 2 SCANNED.pdf

Consider using `-depth 1`, `-depth 3` as a final parameter to map colors to only 2¹=2 or 2³=8 instead of 2²=4 gray levels. Using a small number of gray levels SIGNIFICANTLY reduces file size and also gives your pseudo-scanned document a more pixelated, it-just-came-out-of-my-old-printer look.

Also consider using `-density 100` or even `-density 75` for long text documents. Using a density of 75 dpi produces documents that are 4x smaller than 150 dpi (75²=150²/4) and doesn't affect the readability of normal-sized (10-12pt) text that much.

Finally, sometimes it works best not to add Gaussian noise.

miles6• 6 years ago

Rather than making a COMPACT version, your command created a file over twice the size of one created using the aforementioned

convert letter.pdf -colorspace gray \( +clone -blur 0x1 \) +swap -compose divide -composite -linear-stretch 5%x0% -rotate 1.5 as-scanned.pdf

However, that may be a useful feature, since many users end up inadvertently creating very large PDFs when scanning.

baicunko26• 6 years ago

I'm taking notes on all comments, I will test what you mentioned to see how the document ends up looking, thanks!

mNovak2• 6 years ago

For other noobish windows users like myself, you can simply dump the following into a bat file. When run, it'll look for a file called "scanThis.pdf" and apply the conversion with ImageMagick.

   IF EXIST scanThis.pdf (magick convert -density 100 scanThis.pdf -colorspace gray +noise Gaussian -rotate 0.5 -depth 2 SCANNED.pdf) ELSE (ECHO File scanThis.pdf not found & PAUSE)

stormdennis2• 6 years ago

Sorry, I'm a long term Windows user but not very proficient. That can't be there entire contents of the bat file, can it? What else goes in there?

cristaloleg• 6 years ago

Sounds like a plan to compile it into WASM and run locally inside any browser.

To be honest, I'm waiting for a boom of such services, that can be run in a separate tab without any network jumps.

so_serious• 6 years ago

It should be '-dAutoFilterColorImages=true' instead of 'dAutoFilterColorImages=true' for the gs command.

davchana• 6 years ago

What I do, is print the PDF as image, with 60% jpg quality. JPG artifacts make it look like normal quality scan.

I have my 3-4 copies of signatures as font file, along with initials.

electriclove• 6 years ago

Can this be done client side so the PDF does not need to be uploaded anywhere?

baicunko26• 6 years ago

I will implement a desktop stand-alone app for those private documents which can't be uploaded somewhere else!

thesis• 6 years ago

Pretty cool!

What I normally do in a pinch is use Google Drive.. it has a "scan" option that you can take a picture with your phone.

jeffbee• 6 years ago

FWIW the output can be significantly better using PhotoScan app, also from Google, no idea why they don’t integrate them.

ecnahc515• 6 years ago

Also semi-related: http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/

hawaiian• 6 years ago

Needs options for adding dog ears and a shadow cast from the top of the page, and maybe stapler holes.

supernova87a• 6 years ago

Not saying this site is, but it makes me think of all the (less legit) file conversion websites which are basically portals to harvest your documents (or your aging parents' documents that they don't otherwise know how to convert), and you later find they appear on crappy sites like Scribd. Or worse.

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

I use these to 'accidentally' upload marketing collateral. Got some clickbacks through unique UTMs so I know it works.

eob• 6 years ago

Any chance you could elaborate a bit? This sounds interesting but I'm not in the know enough to read between the lines.

You were trying to see if someone was sniffing the documents uploaded (and confirmed they were).... or you realized you could use them as a vector though which others would post your materials on websites elsewhere (and they did)?

jaflo• 6 years ago

Were these PDFs? I wonder if they were human or automated clicks. Also do you recall which website?

greenknight• 6 years ago

You may want to purge the key in your repo (settings.py)

abiogenesis• 6 years ago

Obligatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/1683/

krick• 6 years ago

Seriously, how stupid it is that this can be actually useful.

9nGQluzmnq3M• 6 years ago

Neat site, but is this really necessary? I switched to digital-only PDFs (edit online & slap in image of signature) a long time ago, without doing any obfuscation to make them look "real", and I've never gotten any pushback from the various government agencies, banks, insurance companies etc that insist on signed & scanned forms.

andrewingram• 6 years ago

I tried to get a refund from MyProtein about 18 months ago because my order never arrived. I filled in the refund pdf and slapped on a previously scanned copy of my signature that’s stored in the MacOS Preview app. They rejected it and said it had to be my real signature. I was really annoyed with them and haven’t shopped there since.

terrycody• 6 years ago

Really question is in some cases, you still need to sign your signature and then scan the document again, I hope this website can let you add signature automatically...

aasasd• 6 years ago

Funny thing is, some countries require documents to be signed on paper and then scanned. E.g. Japan.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

can you put an example picture side by side, right on the frontpage

baicunko26• 6 years ago

Yes, I think it's a great idea. I'll work on this through the weekend and update the website with other feedback received. Thanks

camillomiller2• 6 years ago

I live in Germany and I never had anyone telling me that a PDF signed digitally wasn’t enough, especially if they expect you to e-mail it back to them. Is this a US problem?

sabertoothed• 6 years ago

Just had it in Germany with an application to a bank (DKB). Digitally signed one was rejected. I need to print on paper, sign and then scan. Signing the PDF in an iPad app was not OK.

camillomiller2• 6 years ago

Oh, interesting, then I guess I was just lucky. DKB is indeed well known for being quite old-school. I'll add that in my case the need for a printed and hand-signed copy was always connected to shipping the document or faxing it. Never through email.

dantondwa• 6 years ago

I live in Italy and ING Direct did this to me. The same happened in Belgium with KBC, so I think some banks might still be doing this here, unfortunately!

talkinghead• 6 years ago

example on landing page would be great

miki123211• 6 years ago

I believe printing, signing and scanning should be a punishable crime. It has a terrible impact on accessibility, as the whole text layer of the PDF is lost and it becomes unreadable for screen readers.

IRM2• 6 years ago

have somebody download Roblox on school compoter

IRM2• 6 years ago

Hav somebody download ROBLOX on a school computer

chmaynard• 6 years ago

Apparently I'm the only person on HN that doesn't understand what a "scanned look" means, and the author doesn't provide any images to illustrate. Could someone enlighten me?

baicunko26• 6 years ago

Sure! I tried to simulate the print, sign and scan of documents to avoid having to do it.

Sample PDF: https://campustecnologicoalgeciras.es/wp-content/uploads/201...

Output PDF: https://scanyourpdf.com/media/Scan_2020513_gtqh.pdf

EDIT: Forgot to mention that a before and after will be included in the website as it has been mentioned multiple times as a great way of showing what the website does!

mapster• 6 years ago

For signing docs I open PDF in Illustrator and place my signature image then save and send. Are they really looking for signs of document having been scanned?

Show HN: Make Your PDF Look Scanned

Related Stories