make-look-scanned
A command-line tool, also runnable in the browser through WebAssembly, that degrades a PDF to look like a physical scanner output, with adjustable skew, grain, blur, and paper tone.
make-look-scanned is a command-line tool that takes a PDF and makes it look like a scan of a printed page: it applies skew, grayscale conversion, a warm paper tint, scanner grain, defocus, edge shadow, and JPEG compression artifacts. Each page is rasterized to an image, run through the effect pipeline, and reassembled into a new image-only PDF, so the original selectable text is not preserved.
Every effect is controlled by a numeric flag that can be set to zero to disable it, and reusable presets can be defined in a configuration file and selected by name. Output is deterministic by default, since the random seed is derived from the input file's content, so the same input always produces the same result unless a different seed is requested.
The same effect pipeline also runs client-side in a browser through a WebAssembly build. It is written in Go and requires a C toolchain to build, since it links the MuPDF library through cgo.