make-look-scanned

make-look-scanned takes a clean digital PDF and degrades it on purpose, so it looks like it came off an office scanner. Skew, grayscale, paper tone, scanner grain, soft focus, edge shadows, JPEG artifacts. The kind of imperfections that say a human ran this through a machine instead of exporting it from a template. Free and open source under AGPL-3.0.

It runs three ways. There is a Go CLI for batch work, a browser version that does everything client-side via WebAssembly, and a single self-contained HTML file you can save and run offline. Nothing gets uploaded; the whole pipeline rasterizes each page to an image and reassembles it locally. Output is deterministic by default, so the same file produces the same result every time.

This is a single-purpose utility, and it does its one job cleanly. If you need to submit a signed document that is supposed to look physically handled, or you are testing how a system copes with scanned input, this beats fiddling with image filters by hand. Free for anyone, no account, no limits.

The catch is in the output. Because it rasterizes every page to an image, the result has no selectable text, exactly like a real scan. That is the point, but it means you cannot search or copy from the file afterward. And AGPL-3.0 is worth a look if you plan to fold it into a commercial service.