June 20, 2026
PDFs enter their flop era
Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
This app makes clean PDFs look gloriously terrible—and people are oddly into it
TLDR: A new tool turns neat PDF files into fake scanned copies, complete with blur, tilt, and worn-paper vibes, and it even works in a browser without uploading your files. Commenters split between loving the privacy-first idea and asking the obvious question: why would anyone deliberately make a document worse?
A new Show HN project has the internet doing a double take: it takes a perfectly normal PDF and makes it look like it survived a trip through a dusty office scanner from 2007. We’re talking crooked pages, faded gray text, yellow-ish paper, blur, shadows, and those crunchy image artifacts that scream “somebody faxed this twice.” Even wilder, it works both as a command-line tool and right in the browser, so people can ruin their documents locally without handing them to a random website.
And yes, that privacy angle is where the comments got spicy. The creator said they built it because existing online tools make you upload files to someone else’s server, which felt “sketchy at best.” That instantly gave the project a mini folk-hero vibe: less “why would anyone do this?” and more “finally, shady PDF sites found dead in a ditch.”
But the thread wasn’t all applause emojis. One commenter delivered the obvious reality check: who is asking for documents to be less readable on purpose? That became the central hot take of the discussion. Is this a brilliant niche tool for realism, demos, props, and privacy-conscious weirdos—or a hilariously unnecessary machine for making your life harder? Another user jumped in with a practical suggestion: if the tool already turns pages into images, why not let people export straight to JPG or PNG too?
So the mood was equal parts admiration, confusion, and geeky mischief. The loudest reactions weren’t about code at all—they were about the delicious absurdity of a tool whose entire purpose is to make polished files look worse, but in a very convincing way.
Key Points
- •make-look-scanned converts PDFs into image-only PDFs that simulate physical scans using effects such as skew, grayscale, paper tint, noise, blur, edge shadow, and JPEG artifacts.
- •The CLI is built in Go and requires a C toolchain because go-fitz links MuPDF via cgo, producing a self-contained binary with no runtime installation required.
- •The tool is deterministic by default, deriving its seed from the input PDF content; the same input and seed produce a byte-identical PDF.
- •Reusable presets can be defined in a config.toml file, with precedence ordered as built-in defaults, selected preset values, and then explicit CLI flags.
- •The browser version uses WebAssembly and PDF.js for rasterization because go-fitz/MuPDF cannot compile to wasm in this setup; its output is visually similar to the CLI but not byte-identical.