I'm having a similar use case from time to time, I just use imagemagick<p>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
Thank you for making this a free tool,<p>There are too many that are unnecessarily paywalled, that don't make sense.<p>We need more tools from paid ones that should be completely free.
Is there any good tool that does the opposite — turning scanned documents into clean PDFs? I’ve had that need recently.
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.
I've been in situations where I had to supply a digital version of a signed document but the person asking for it required that it be physically printed off to be signed and then scanned back in. Some policy thing. I think it would technically be fraud to use this but that's one use I thought of.<p>The description however seems like the creator just likes how scanned documents look. They describe it like how analogue music fans describe vinyl records. I guess everything is nostalgic to someone out there eventually.
For some value of practical, I could see it being useful in making handouts for an RPG where the handout is supposed to be a photocopy of a section of some rare book the players need to scan for clues.
This is in fact useful for people who demand you to print out and sign contracts. Did so many times in the past, using some ghostscript+imagemagick scripting to avoid the cargo culturing.
Typically when I send a form I will do as much as possible in a PDF editor, including the signature. Most of the world is in denial about how electronic documents, especially scanned ones, work, so you have to play along to stop them from getting upset.
Sometimes companies demand you print/sign/scan a document.
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.
I made this because the online "make my PDF look scanned" tools want you to upload your file to their servers, which feels sketchy at best. Also, I wasn't happy with the output they produce, I wanted something that looks realistic.
This needs a flag to insert random blank pages
Useful tool
Niceee