Alternatives
Products that do what Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM) does
I made this because the online "make my PDF look scanned" tools want you to upload your file to their servers, which feels sketchy at best. Also, I wasn't happy with the output they produce, I wanted something that looks realistic.
- 1MY
2020 · scanyourpdf.com
- 2MY
Implement scanyourpdf.com in JavaScript. No backend servers needed.
2022 · lookscanned.io
- 3FM
2020 · gitlab.com
- 4PT
Hi, OP here. A friend was involved in a custody battle and was afraid his ex was going to leak all of his discovery documents on the internet and he asked if there was something I could do to make it harder for bots/crawlers to find sensitive information. Originally I was going to turn all of his docs to image based PDFs, but those get large fast and are easy to OCR. So I found a post musing about altering fonts/glyphs so that it looks like english, but the actual character being seen by the pdf reader is a non-english character. As such, when you try to OCR these files, it doesn't…
2022 · humaneyesonly.com
- 5
- 6FI
Add text, input boxes, pictures, signatures, delete pages, merge PDFs and password protect them. All happening in the browser, 100% free and no sign-up.
2025 · breezepdf.com
- 7
- 8CF
I've always thought that extensive reading was best suited for the realm of paper. As a result, I've created a command-line interface (CLI) tailored for my own use and decided to make it open source. I welcome any feedback you may have. [Edit] Sample PDF :: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n7M1TKOptSsYiibrbvV_Yojx53T...
2024 · github.com
- 9
- 10SD
2023 · github.com
- 11CS
2015 · searchablepdfs.org
- 12
No scanner? No problem. Realistic scan effects for your docs
Mar 2026
- 13YC
I just realized you can now open a PDF document in Firefox and select text directly from scanned images embedded in the document (so basically transparently reliable doing OCR). It is also surprisingly reliable, only sometimes mistaking a "oh" for a "zero" in a long string of numbers. I neither know when this was introduced nor who added this feature, but from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, you have made my daily life a lot easier. I also haven't really explored the limits of the feature and under what conditions it starts failing, but: in my daily workflow so far,…
2024
- 14TA
Hello HN! It kept surprising me how much of a hassle it is to generate a PDF with decent HTML5 rendering from my SaaS apps. I tried several free libs and APIs but ended up with botched rendering a lot of times. So I set out to simplify this chore by creating an AWS hosted HTML to PDF conversion API that's based on Chrome. This API will allow a dev to just send the HTML to our API and get a PDF in response without having to worry about running and managing Chrome somewhere in their infra. I just finished the first version of my landing page and hosted pdf generation API…
2018
- 15IM
2017 · photopdf.com
- 16
Free online OCR editor to edit scanned PDF text in browser
Aug 2026 · editscannedpdf.com
- 17AW
Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21BA
Hey HN, solo dev here. After years of frustration with how LLMs handle complex documents, especially PDFs with tables, I decided to build a solution myself. My approach uses a Markdown conversion step to preserve the table structure, which seems to work surprisingly well for chunking. This little parser is the first public piece of a much larger, privacy-focused AI platform I'm building. I'm pretty much running on fumes financially, so any feedback, critique, or support is massively appreciated. Happy to answer any questions about the approach!
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 22PM
I created this tool to make it quick and easy to sign PDF contracts, without having to deal with installing additional software and without worrying that my PDFs will get uploaded to a third party. It supports the bare minimum for my most common usecases. It is not intended to be a full-featured PDF editor. Features include filling PDF forms, inserting images and text, and rotating PDFs. Check it out by either picking a PDF of your own - https://photown.github.io/private-pdf/, or with a preloaded sample PDF -…
2023 · github.com
- 23
- 24P5
Hi HN! I built PDFly — a PDF toolkit that runs entirely client-side. No file uploads, no server processing, no account needed. It has 56 tools including merge, split, compress, convert, redact, compare, and an AI chat feature to ask questions about your PDF content. Everything runs in your browser using [mention your tech stack if relevant, e.g., WASM/JS libraries]. Would love feedback on the tools, UX, or anything else!
Jul 2026 · pdfly.uk
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →