Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)

In plain words

This tool processes PDFs to make them appear as though they were scanned documents, available either as a command-line utility or through a browser-based WASM application. It was created to address privacy concerns with online scanning simulators that require server uploads, and to produce more realistic output than existing alternatives. Developers can use it locally without sharing files with third parties.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Makes PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM) - overflowy/make-look-scanned

A CLI that takes a PDF and degrades it to look like a physical scan of a printout — skew, grayscale, warm paper tone, scanner grain, defocus, edge shadow, and JPEG compression artifacts. Also runs client-side in the browser via WASM. Each page is rasterized to an image, run through the effect pipeline, and reassembled into a new image-only PDF (the original selectable text is gone — faithful to a basic scanner). Requires Go and a C toolchain (go-fitz links MuPDF via cgo, so the binary is self-contained — nothing to install at runtime). go build -o make-look-scanned . Usage make-look-scanned [flags] input.pdf Flags may appear before or after the input filename. make-look-scanned in.pdf # ->…from github.com

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