[iamjackg]

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.

[duxup]

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.

[SllX]

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.

[creakingstairs]

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…

[mushyhammer]

I bet code reviews with markers are fun though.

[potatochup]

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

[rovr138]

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.

[someweirdperson]

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.

[iancmceachern]

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.

[geoffeg]

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.

[tzs]

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

[blahgeek]

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.

[someweirdperson]

> 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.

[jjar]

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

[jagged-chisel]

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.

[dfcowell]

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.