About the Scanner Effect
Turn a crisp digital PDF into something that looks like it went through a real office scanner — slightly rotated pages, paper grain, softened edges, tuned contrast and optional grayscale. Useful when a form must appear hand-processed, when you want a digitally signed contract to match the rest of a scanned bundle, or for realistic mock-ups and test data. The PDF is rendered and rebuilt entirely in your browser.
What the effect does to each page
- Rotation — a random tilt of a degree or two per page, the tell-tale sign of paper fed through a scanner.
- Grayscale — converts colour to shades of grey, as most document scanners are set to do by default.
- Noise — adds fine paper grain and sensor speckle so flat white areas look like paper rather than a vector fill.
- Blur — softens the razor-sharp edges of digital text to mimic optical resolution.
- Brightness and contrast — reproduce the slightly washed-out or heavy-black look of different scanner settings.
- JPEG compression — pages are re-encoded as photographs, exactly as a scanner would output them.
How it works
Each page is rasterised with PDF.js at a chosen DPI, drawn to a canvas where the transformations are applied, compressed to JPEG, and placed into a fresh PDF with pdf-lib. Because the output is image-based, the original text layer is not carried over — which is also how genuine scans behave. If you need the result to remain searchable, run it through an OCR step afterwards.
Tips for a convincing result
- Keep rotation small (0.5–1.5°); real scans are rarely more crooked than that.
- Use light noise and a touch of blur together — either one alone looks artificial.
- Slightly increase contrast for the classic photocopier look, or lower brightness a little for an older scanner.
- Sign the PDF first with the Sign PDF tool so the signature is scanned along with the page.
- Compress the output with Compress PDF if the file needs to be emailed.
How to use the Scanner Effect
- 1Open the PDF. Drop your document onto the page. Pages are rendered locally for preview.
- 2Tune the effect. Adjust rotation, grayscale, noise, blur, brightness and contrast while watching the live preview.
- 3Apply. Click Apply to process every page.
- 4Download. Save the scanned-looking PDF.
Frequently asked questions
- Will the text still be selectable in the output?
- No. Like a real scan, the output pages are images. That is part of what makes it look authentic; use an OCR tool afterwards if you need searchable text.
- Does it work on colour documents?
- Yes. Leave grayscale off to keep colours with the added grain and tilt, or turn it on for a black-and-white scan look.
- How large will the output file be?
- Because pages become JPEG images, file size depends on page count and DPI — typically 100–300 KB per page at standard settings. Lower the DPI or use Compress PDF for smaller files.
- Is my document uploaded?
- No. Rendering, effects and PDF assembly all happen in your browser.