Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)

Category: cli-tool

Tags: pdf, cli-tool, webassembly, document-processing, image-effects

Score: 6.5/10 (Innovation: 6, Technical: 7, Documentation: 7, Utility: 6)

This project provides a CLI and browser-based tool (via WebAssembly) that degrades PDFs to look like scanned physical printouts, with configurable effects like skew, grayscale, noise, and jpeg artifacts. Its deterministic output and ability to run entirely client-side in the browser make it a novel and practical utility for document workflows, though it is niche and replaces selectable text with images.

Target audience: backend devs, devops, document engineers

Repository: https://github.com/overflowy/make-look-scanned · Go · AGPL-3.0

View on Hacker News