01What happened

The story, straight

A developer named overflowy posted a Show HN on June 20 for make-look-scanned, an open-source CLI tool written in Go that takes any PDF and runs it through an effect pipeline — skew, grayscale, warm paper tone, scanner grain, defocus, edge shadow, and JPEG compression artifacts — to produce a new PDF that looks like it was fed through a physical scanner. The tool also runs client-side in the browser via WebAssembly. Each page is rasterized, processed, and reassembled into an image-only PDF, stripping the original selectable text to stay faithful to what a real scan looks like. The output is deterministic by default, with the seed derived from the input PDF's content, meaning the same file always produces a byte-identical result.

developer overflowy dropped a Go CLI tool on Hacker News that takes any PDF and mangles it into looking like it ran through a beat-up office scanner — skew, grain, warm paper tone, defocus, edge shadows, JPEG artifacts, the whole deal. also runs in-browser via WASM so you don't need to install anything. it rasterizes each page, applies the effect pipeline, and spits out an image-only PDF (the original text is gone, which is the point). output is deterministic too — same input, same byte-identical scan every time.

02Spread timeline

Where it actually started

Jun 20, 2026Origin
Developer overflowy posts Show HN for make-look-scanned, an open-source CLI tool that degrades PDFs to resemble physical scans.overflowy drops a Show HN for make-look-scanned
source

03Source receipts

Every claim, linked

04What's solid, what isn't

What's solid and what isn't

Confirmed
  • make-look-scanned is an open-source Go CLI tool that degrades PDFs to look like physical scanner output
  • The tool supports effects including skew, grayscale, warm paper tone, scanner grain, defocus, edge shadow, and JPEG compression artifacts
  • It runs client-side in the browser via WebAssembly
  • Output is deterministic by default, with seed derived from input PDF content

05Why it matters

The editorial take

The tool addresses a surprisingly common need: making digital documents look physically scanned, whether for bureaucratic form submissions, novelty, or creative projects. Its deterministic output and browser-based WASM mode make it notably more practical than ad-hoc Photoshop approaches, and the open-source Go codebase means it can be integrated into automated workflows.

anyone who's ever had to make a PDF look like they actually printed and scanned it — for forms, bureaucracy, whatever — knows the pain of manually faking it in Photoshop. this tool automates the entire thing with reproducible output, and the WASM version means normies can use it in-browser without touching a terminal.