Show HN: Make your PDF look scanned in browser
lookscanned.io
Implement scanyourpdf.com in JavaScript. No backend servers needed.
lookscanned.io
#1 - It rotates AND scales to fit. It's not obvious until you rotate a stupid amount, but pages don't shrink when scanned for real.
#2 - The scanning rotation is way too uniform. Most scans twist a bit, typically near the top when more of the page is in the scanner to straighten it out.
#3 - With #2 there should be some stretching/skewing that isn't uniform.
#4 - The noise is way too uniform as well. It looks like static. Typical scanned documents have noise that is much more variable. You also get other scanning artifacts like streaks for dirt on the scan head.
#5 - The page ends often aren't even and introduce artifacting as well.
#6 - Needs an option for chewed up staple corner and/or holepunch.
But sometimes they do when printed for real, to keep margins of content within the printable area.
This was my first question whether the noise is absolutely random and inconsistent, otherwise it would be very easy to detect by "authorities" who is insisting on manual scans.
Personally, from a workflow standpoint I'd prefer a PDF Printer driver that would add the effect. I'm sure the website is better for Mobile.
In this case it's all run client-side. You're still trusting that the code you're served wasn't maliciously replaced, but if you want to be careful you could run it in an incognito tab and temporarily disable your internet connection.
Let's presume it is malicious, and the mere act of downloading the WASM starts an injection.
1. load the site in an incognito tab
2. disable internet
3. run the conversion and download the result
4. close the incognito tab
5. re-connect the internet
In Firefox this is not possible (per tab), but at least you can set the entire browser to offline mode by clicking "File -> Work Offline"
I haven't spent a huge amount of time in the browser security space, but I do think there is quite alot of surface area if you give the browser session sensitive data.
You're right though in general, that's why the incognito tab is important.
In any event, it's an unrealistic attack vector. No bad actor is going to target 0.1% of edge cases when you could get enough damaging information from people who do not go through this process and remain connected to the internet.
Some things are far too sensitive to ever touch a computer.
1. https://gist.github.com/andyrbell/25c8632e15d17c83a54602f6ac...
A friend of mine got a letter from his neighbor's attorney bitching about his tree or something stupid. So he literally wiped his ass with it and then took a picture of it and emailed it back with the body of the email saying thanks, I was running out of TP.
can you add that feature ?
From personal experience 99% of what attorneys are paid to do is send threatening letters that have nothing to back them up.
In this case of course nothing happened. But my friend said his neighbor just gave him a dirty look from then on but that would have happened anyway.
If someone can sue you they probably will, If they don't have a case their lawyer will send you a stupid letter.
Not really. People will normally try to resolve things without going to court unless there is a time sensitive issue that they need emergency relief like a temporary restraining order to secure, or they just want to make a point more than get compensation, because resolution without court is cheaper (meaning they get to keep more of the recovery), quicker, and—where an ongoing relationship is involved—less likely to burn bridges.
People who can sue you, and would have you dead to rights, will often bend over backwards to avoid it as long as possible without losing the option if there is a plausible chance at resolution without going to court.
It's a legal lawyer scam. He get's probably $1K for sending a stupid letter, little old lady gets to pay her lawyer to do her bidding instead of walking over and simply saying hey, you tree limb is over my property or whatever.
Do you expect old frail ladies to have shouting matches with younger men twice their size?
I personally find my lawyer does way better at negotiations than myself, that's what I use him for.
I know a bit about tree law in the USA. Neighbors have a right to trim (they must do it, unless the tree is obviously diseased.)any part of a tree that comes over their property line. It's a bit more nuanced, but that's basically the law. (I belive the Tree Cutting outfit is suspose to cut the limbs with care. I mean they are not suspose to introduce pathogens from their tools onto your trees. I have Oak trees and worry about their health. I've noticed PG&E is hiring pretty much any out fit to trim trees. They are seemingly untrained. They don't know what that it's not the low voltage lines that are causing the fires? Years ago I noticed they don't seem to sanitize their chain saws. I once, before the fires, asked PG&E to spray a bit of bleach on their tooling through an email. The following day, there was a side show of sanitizer being sprayed everywhere, and they filmed it. I had no inclination of formally complaining. I just thought a quick clean might kill any pathogens. We have a problem in northern CA with Oak trees dying.
Oh yea, just because a healthy tree falls from your property and damages your neighbors property; it doesn't necessarily mean you are liable to repair their property. It's more complicated. If a lawyer reads this could you educate me?
I ended up just paying my neighbor, who's a lawyer, because a tree healthy tree fell on her property. The tree's trunk truck was 1/2 on the property line. I wasen't feeling good, and didn't want or could afford a fight with a miserable house bound attorney. From my understanding, I probally didn't need to pay anything. (I don't think she had a conversation with anyone without mentioned she passed the bar.)
Resorting to lawyers deserves a shit stain unless the above does not work first.
I’m sure this letter made the rounds; clowns on this big brand; and gets free exposure for the underdog. Worth the $500 to write the letter.
Will consider similar tactics in the future.
Which tells you what a crappy (hehe) hustle these letters must be.
I spoke with a few lawyers and they said the appropriate response to that embarrassing letter is to throw it away and not think of it again.
They never sued for $1MM and technically I have something like 6 years to sue him for breech and the $75k if I want to... Likely won't as the legal bill will be $100k.
There's something extremely wrong with your implementation as it just takes too much to render every page.
I've done plenty of work in the past with both canvas and pdf.js (which is what you're using) and it shouldn't be that slow, at all. Perhaps you have a rogue loop that's calling a very expensive function on each pixel of every page, maybe?
Who knows, but for sure performance on that could be near real-time.
https://codepen.io/almosnow/pen/abEXBZP?editors=0011
(at the end of the blur pass it prints the elapsed time to the console)
You're right, it does get kind of slow at 2x, but not that slow, on my laptop it takes around 1 sec/page, while on your site takes 20-30 secs/page. Also, my very naive code does not take into account "warming up" and some other code optimizations to make the blur much faster, you could easily get it down to 100ms/page, I'm sure!
Best luck!
It feels like this is the sort of tool one needs (very) infrequently, and those cases don’t seem like the sort of thing where seconds really matter. I think it’s plenty good enough.
I prefer to focus on how grateful I am that the author has made this and published it for free.
When one first opens the site and nothing happens for 30 secs. you assume that the pdf you're looking at is the actual result (that happened to me, at least), then the other one pops up and you're like ... ooooh I get it!
Most users wouldn't be as patient and just leave.
C'mon, show us an example/demo
https://github.com/rwv/lookscanned.io/blob/main/public/examp...
This would assumedly let you use an image of your signature rather than printing and signing.
If the bank really cared, they would ask for the PDF and have you mail the wet signed documents in.
Likely the requirement for a wet signature is left over from earlier times (think fax machines) OR they are trying to ensure that the person actually signing is the person signed (in other words, YOU did the signature, not you asking your wife/broker/whoever to apply it for you).
A lot of companies in the EU are still refusing to accept eIDAS PDF signatures (which are actually verifiable, and required by EU and national law to be accepted for all purposes previously requiring a "wet" signature).
It is trivial to take a timestamped and geo stamped video in this day and age of a person agreeing to a contract, and yet the standard is still "signatures".
Meanwhile people are posting video clips of themselves and their locations all day on WhatsApp/instagram/tiktok/youtube/facebook.
But you could use it to get one over people who insist on receiving (scanned) 'originals' or 'wet-ink signature's, by combining it with something like handwritten.js [0]..!
I assumed that this software is basically a tongue-in-cheek reference to that, I had no idea this can actually have a practical purpose.
To remedy this, I'd doctor previous invoices, and then print, scan, and fax to hide any editing artifacts. Keep in mind, this is all to get my own money that I'd contributed to the FSA. After that year, I just stopped using the FSA because it was such a pain.
The last FSA I had was the exact opposite. They put my FSA on a Visa card, then I went to the optometrist and forgot to use it and paid on my own credit card. A week later, I got a check in the mail from my FSA with a note basically saying "Hey, you could have used your FSA for that, so here's an automatic reimbursement."
EDIT: It may have been an HSA, not an FSA. I don't remember.
A lot of the times the recipient will complain that the signature was not handwritten. They want you to print it, sign it and scan it again. So you do this trick to make it look like you followed this process.
This website is not the first one that tries to achieve this. But I would not trust uploading anything to a random Web server though.
I usually do it via command line. You can use ImageMagick (i.e via the 'convert' command) to achieve the same result. It's very handy.
As Bill Hicks says "Hey, pretend like you're working!"
Everything else is post-facto rationalisation. In other words, they'll dream up anything as a way to explain why you have to conform to their process, variously invoking "standard practice", "regulation", "security", with total disregard for the truth. It is the process with which they identify vicariously, are attached to, and are obliged to defend. The process owns them.
As for the solution. Funny as it is, it's an example of tragic new realm of digital technology whose purpose is to fake human agency, and create desired appearance over any actual reality.
I'm not just talking about spambots, or automated essay mills for students to buy their way to a degree one cheat at a time. These are what Douglas Adams called "Electric Monks". They believe in make-work bullshit so that real people don't have to. This is the future of AI, the adversarial workplace, a technological arms race around make-work wage-slavery which creates no tangible economic value; avatars that stand in for people remote working so they can sunbathe in the garden... like that little pecking bird that Homer Simpson gets to run the nuclear plant by pecking on the Y key.
Whoever can afford the best Electric Monks wins the game, because they will be able to free their attention for real life.
edit: italics
Really hoping AI ushers us into the resource based economy where humans are freed from rudimentary labor.
I was thinking of something a little different and even considered specifically excluding Kafka and indeed Weber (I've read a lot of Franz Kafka but am a Cliffs Notes imposter on Max Weber) from my comment.
In The Trial, or Before the Law, the anxiety lies in not knowing the mind of a, possibly ambivalent, judging other. In modernity, Weber's modernity, it is spelled out in intricate, mind numbing detail, in reams of forms that must be gymnastically navigated. One step further in the direction I am describing is the officers of Jaroslav Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk In this incarnation bureaucracy is not an all-powerful force to be feared, it is a stumbling, stuttering, inconsistent fool of a thing that can be easily tricked. It brings tedium not anxiety. I'll wager many hackers relate to that experience of encountering systems.
That is what I mean by the vision of AI versus AI. Two broken retarded robots sprawling about in the mud while humans gather around in a circle and laugh. But the last laugh is on us for building them and getting enchanted by the spectacle.
I think the clearest indicator that this is going on is when you can circumvent the process arbitrarily. Two example memories spring to mind:
In a visa office: "fill out form X, you can get one from the table over there" / "There are none left" / "OK never mind give me your passport and I'll stamp it".
At my Big Tech employer: "please fill out this document template detailing the update and version history of your service, for an audit" / "really? This looks time consuming and I don't really understand the the reason why you need it" / "OK, never mind then"
(Actually, at Big Tech I have found that replying along the lines of "really though?" is a very good first response when confronted with Processes. Sometimes when reporting bugs the template asks you to e.g. gather traces with browser extensions or whatever. I always say "I will do that if you first confirm that it will actually be useful for this bug" and haven't yet received such a confirmation)
But there is something about the aesthetic of such things, it's why the IETF RFC's (example https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8200.html) are made to look like typewritten pages even decades after typewriters stopped being in common usage. I am surprised that they don't "go all the way" with that look and also apply some simulated coffee stains, dog-ears, and stapling artifacts.
Form should match the shape of the medium, not fight it.
I think they did a pretty good job making a document that can be navigated as people are accustomed to, while adapting to the medium. The aesthetic is not without function.
And really, if they cared about being able reference things to the n-th degree, the figures would have been captioned and have their own figure-number instead of just sort-of "in there" like a paragraph (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8200.html#section-4.4).
It’s also called “Buelr,” which really captures the energy of what you’re talking about.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ferris-bueller-inspired-produ...
Brilliant. Thanks for that. Exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
See my note above re blurring the lines a little in Photoshop.
In my ancient version of Acrobat I created rubber stamps from the PNGs. Two clicks to drop them in, a quick resize and adjust the placement, and Bob’s your uncle. Never need a pen again.
I'll reiterate what I said there: I think there's a legal angle here that should probably be sorted out by lawyers & forensics experts before something like this goes into widespread use or gets marketed at professional scale.
The law sometimes requires certain documents to be "in writing" and there is, unfortunately, a legal tradition tied to this that "in writing" means "physically on paper", which lawmakers and bureaucrats unfortunately haven't managed to properly transition into the digital age.
However something that is quite a separate matter is the question of whether one needs to actually be in possession of that piece of paper. A scan of an original serves as proof that the original exists. ...and this is usually all that anyone requires for practical intents and purposes.
But: You're not supposed to do print/sign/scan, and then just throw away the original or not have an original in the first place. You're kind of supposed to keep it in case you're ever asked by a court to produce it. The document partially loses its forensic value if no original can be produced.
Even worse: If a digital forensics expert can prove in court that a piece of digital forensics came from this tool, it may no longer be possible to distinguish a scenario where you used it in good faith because you didn't have a scanner on hand versus a scenario involving fraud where a third party used a scan of your signature plus this tool to create the appearance that you signed and scanned a document that you never did in fact sign. Or it could be alleged that you might have deliberately used this tool instead of signing the document for real to deliberately engineer deniability into this piece of digital forensics based on the previous line of reasoning.
Personally, I'd advise anyone to just keep their distance from these sorts of tools.
And writing/using the tool as a web service where people upload documents instead of downloading the tool seems like an especially bad idea. Why take the risk of exposing presumably sensitive documents to a third party?
What would one need a receipt for other than tax purposes? I suspect submitting one of these with your tax return to HMRC or the like, is quite probably "fraud" of some description.
Submitting it to your employer simply puts you or them on the hook for that same fraud if it happened to get picked up in an audit by the tax office.
Is there some other less legally grey use for these (because I like the idea)?
So you got a meal and 6 beers and restaurant puts "meal" on receipt but you put your beers as business expense.
You can explain that waiter is OK with it (mostly because he expects you to come back next days or get a nice tip) but it still makes you a dipshit.
In fact, AFAIK a company is not even allowed to issue an invoice twice without clearly labeling it as "copy of the original" and most companies must keep the invoices they issued as well as their books (and thus the invoices they received) for at least 10 years[1].
I suppose the legal situation must be very similar in other EU countries. One reason being, for instance, that invoices are used (by companies that deduct VAT) to request back from the tax authorities the VAT that one pays on invoices by other companies (in the EU). The invoice you receive from a company must therefore match that company's books. All hell would break lose if everyone could just forge invoices, whether with bad intentions or not.
Case in point: Here[2] is a guy asking for legal advice as he's being charged with document forgery even though we wasn't trying to defraud anyone or anything. Specifically, he had lost the invoice of the TV he was trying to sell on Ebay, so he ended up forging it because Ebay required people to upload the original invoice to sell TVs on the marketplace.
Invoices, and more generally the receipts underlying bookkeeping transactions, are the fundamental building block of reliable bookkeeping (and company audits, mind you).
[0]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__267.html
[1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/hgb/__257.html
[2]: https://www.frag-einen-anwalt.de/Urkundenfaelschung-undoder-...
If you simply lost or don't have a receipt and it's done in good faith I don't think it should be considered fraud.
I guess the company takes the fairly minimal tax hit by nownactually claiming it, and they allow it due to trust (and low numbers).
Presenting a self-written receipt as a fake of a real receipt, not so much.
But if they aren't willing to take a self-written receipt, what do you do ...
https://legacy.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.ph...
I use it to print posters and big templates for cutting out e.g. foam board from plans.
When he approached us with the content assembled from photocopies we thought that it’d be the right solution to keep the richness and somehow the warmth of the pages (there are also the pencil-made marks).
We had to re-scan all the photocopies…
Then it becomes a useful tool to deal with opposing counsel...
So maybe a variant which makes it look like a photo - fake background, some perspective warping, bad lighting, with fake phone EXIF and selectable geolocation.
sadly i ended up being busy in other work and they dropped the application because i hadn't submitted some "important" docs. oh well
Of course this becomes cumbersome if you have more than a few pages
Overall, I have noticed this takes me 5-15s to "scan" and send, per page.