Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
Details
- External ID
- 48611513
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- June 20, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 155
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9433060109289617
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- document and PDF utility tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- tool to apply scanned document effects to pdfs
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It compiles standard canvas or image processing filters (rotation, blur, noise, contrast adjustments) to WebAssembly or a CLI tool to alter PDF page renders.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: falsisign (GitHub - similar signature scanning tool), Local conversion tools (without uploading)
Concerns raised: Wet signatures still legally required in many jurisdictions (notarized documents, family law, wills, banking, tax documents), Potential for fraud/misrepresenting document origin and signature authenticity, Privacy concerns with sharing data to third parties, Rejection by institutions that require signatures to look genuinely scanned
Feature requests: Local processing without uploading personal data, Support for various signature styles to avoid detection
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 389 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #13 of 390 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 209 days after the earliest competitor.
- Scanicle · ph · 2026-09-18 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- PDF to MD · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Free, in-browser PDF editor · hn · 2026-03-28 · 54 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- blupdf · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Local PDF Tools · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- PdfShilp · ph · 2026-09-28 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Click and Copy · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- PDFCloudy · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.