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Comment by iamjackg | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a comment I read a long time ago about somebody's experience working for a company that had a branch in Japan. They would demand that some spreadsheets be sent as a fax, and then some employee would be tasked with re-typing all that information back into a spreadsheet later on.

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I once had a cube next to mine. It was the “Japan Cube”, all it had was a printer and a fax machine.

It was only ever used for faxes to and from Japan.

Eventually it was decorated with Japanese art and etc.

Someone once told me this is how they share source code between departments at some software shops in Japan.

I still refuse to believe this is true.

I bet code reviews with markers are fun though.

I've done code reviews on paper, although mostly when I want to understand something, not for review purposes.

I used to carry a red pen at all times for that purpose. Very useful when people had some hardcopy.

That use-case died with the invention of virus-defined wfh.

I've printed long, MESSY, code, huge functions, to review and cleanup.

I loved working with engineers and using their plotter for that. Had a ton of space to actually write things out and draw connections.

Well it’s not source code but my wife’s work print whatever they’ve worked on and it goes around the team while they make change requests one at a time using pen. Once they are happy they stamp it. So I could definitely see people printing source code…

I once worked at a job where one of the owners of the company, when asked to send a pdf copy of a document, would print out the document on the shared office copier/printer, then scan it back in using the same copier/printer and have it email him the pdf. Every single time he ever made a pdf of any file, even hundreds of pages, he would do this way.

At a job many, many years ago I asked a developer on a different team (across town) to email me an XML file I needed for a feature I was working on. After a few hours of not getting anything I checked with him and he said the file was too large and the email server wasn't allowing him to send it to me. It was a few hundred kilobytes, it shouldn't have been a problem but I didn't care too much, I just wanted the file so I asked him to zip it up to reduce the size. A few minutes later he said the email server was still rejecting it, even as a zip file. Getting frustrated, I grabbed my laptop and drove to the other office. He showed me the XML file... which was a Word document with screenshots of the XML document opened in an editor.

Exasperated, I asked him why he couldn't just send me the raw XML file instead of putting screenshots in a Word document. Turns out the document was on another system he had to remote into (with Citrix, I think? I don't remember what was used back then) and he wasn't "allowed" to copy files off that machine.

On the plus side he didn't have to worry about the documents he send inadvertently containing damaging, incriminating, or embarrassing metadata.

There's still plenty of places that specifically require a scanned copy of documents, instead of the original digital one. The printing and scanning process essentially makes it blurry and that's exactly what they want.

I wonder if there's any tool that can achieve the same effect.

> I wonder if there's any tool that can achieve the same effect.

I wonder if that's sarcasm, because it obviously should be possible with a simple call to e.g. convert/imagemagick.

Of course, people who do the printing/scaning would need a simplified GUI to use it.

A quick search on $searchengine showed that e.g. win2pdf has an option to generate an image-only pdf.

The market seems to be covered. Maybe there's room for some advanced variant that adds wrinkles, a minimal rotation, and some coffee-stains.

There is a version - it's been posted on HN before: https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf

When I experience this, they want a “real” signature made by hand with pen ink, but scanned and sent.

Although I keep a few signatures ready in Preview, these do not suffice. I need a tool that makes the signature look like it was created with a blue ink ballpoint.

I have scanned “real” signatures in blue and black with 3 different pens as transparent pngs for exactly this reason. Best 5 minutes in Photoshop I’ve ever spent.

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