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Comment by baicunko | Hacker News Reader

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!

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Pretty cool idea!

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

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

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

> 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.

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

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 iPad with either a finger or an Apple Pencil and a scanned signature done with a pen.

Are you sure that's not just some excuse they gave you?

> 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.

Interestingly, there are LaTeX packages for coffee stains[1] and to simulate the variability of an actual typewriter[2]. I suppose both of these involve discrete objects (the coffee stain, individual characters) and photocopy/scan effects involve 'fuzzing' of the whole image, rather than any particular element, and TeX isn't really set up for the former.

[1] http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349

[2] http://mirrors.concertpass.com/tex-archive/macros/luatex/lat...

What do you use to sign PDFs on your iPad?

I just use my regular Good Notes 5 app and then export back the PDF

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.

Yes, this is a lawyers version of a patch to fix bugs that programmers sometimes introduce.

A couple of years ago I used DocuSign on a contract, and the PDF “copy” I was emailed as a receipt had different terms than the one I actually signed.

Luckily I did not object to the discrepancy, but I would have wondered what would have actually happened if I did.

What?? Is this public? Have others reported this happening? That would be a huge issue!

Let me clarify by stating that I am not necessarily claiming that there is/was a software issue with DocuSign. There are also some big procedural differences between signing a hard copy and the way most electronic signature systems work. I could have been fooled by the user.

Regardless, I am sure there has been a version of a some document signing software somewhere that had a bug with immutability. Now paper documents aren't immutable either, but you couldn't accidentally change one with a bad where clause in a SQL statement, and casual attempts will leave evidence of the change.

> Now paper documents aren't immutable either...

BTW this is why numbers in contracts are often written “1 (one)”: because in the age of pens it was easy to change “1” to “10” or “4” or “one” to “none”

Also why checks do this — checks are actually simply contracts, which were standardized in the US a bit in the 1920s (you’d get a check form, fill in your name and the bank name, then the amounts, etc; current check design With preprinted bank info dates back I believe to the late 1960s.

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

7 years of being a digital nomad, and signing every document digitally, and I never ran into this. TIL.

Unless there is a serious challenge to the contract no one cares. You obviously are okay with the contract and are signing it (if only in an obfuscated, non-physical sense), and they're just looking for a signature that could be kinda real -- if you're good with the deal, and they're good, who cares?

But scanning these documents defeats the point. The law isn't saying "it must be signed with wet ink, but after that a scanned copy is sufficient", it says you need the actual paper with the wet ink signature.

> If you’re a solicitor responsible for registration, you need the other parties' solicitors, on closing, to send you the wet-ink signed parts of the documents. You’ll only proceed when you have the wet-ink signed documents, not when you have seen electronic images of them.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who owns pens in 2020?

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

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