[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.