Make PDF Look Scanned

How to Make PDF Look Scanned

1. 1

   Choose a PDF

   Drop one PDF on the tool, choose it from your files or paste it.

2. 2

   Pick a look

   Choose office scan, photocopy or fax, then adjust tilt, grain and blur while the preview updates.

3. 3

   Download

   Press the button and save the new PDF, which has -scanned added to its name.

What the Scan Effect Does

The tool redraws every page of your PDF so it looks like it went through a scanner. Each page gets its own slight tilt, off-white paper, uneven light, grain and a few dust specks. Some specks sit in the same spot on every page, like dust on a scanner glass. Page size and order stay the same.

Paper is never pure white and ink is never pure black. The preview shows page 1 as it will come out. Each time you open a PDF, the tool picks new random tilts and dust, so two runs of the same file do not match exactly.

Scanner Effect: Three Looks

Pick one of three looks. Office scan is a clean gray scan with soft paper edges and light grain. Photocopy has hard contrast, darker edges, more dust and a faint line like a scratch on the glass. Fax is pure black and white with ragged letters and specks. Each look sets the sliders to its own start.

• Tilt: the largest angle a page can get, from 0 to 2 degrees. At 0 the pages stay straight.
• Grain: paper grain, sensor noise and dust specks, from 0 to 100.
• Blur: how soft the page is, from 0 to 100.
• Keep color: pages keep their colors, slightly washed out, on warm paper. Off, pages are gray. A fax is always black and white.

PDF to Scanned PDF: What Changes

Every page of the result is an image. Its text cannot be selected, searched or copied, and links, form fields and bookmarks are gone. Keep your original. The title and author stored in the original are not copied into the result. The tool changes how pages look and nothing else.

Office scan and photocopy pages are saved as JPEG images at 150 dpi. Fax pages are 1-bit images at 200 dpi. On letter-size pages, an office scan is about 70 to 150 KB per page, a photocopy about 130 to 200 KB and a fax about 10 to 30 KB. A page full of text comes out larger than a page with little text, and keeping color adds about 10 KB per page.

A PDF made by an app holds real text and is tiny, so its result is much larger. A PDF that already is a scan comes out about the same size or smaller. At 150 pages full of text, the office scan look comes to about 22 MB and a photocopy to about 30 MB, which matters if you send the file by email.

• Up to 100 MB and 150 pages on a computer. Up to 30 MB and 40 pages on a phone, because a phone browser has less memory.
• A password-protected PDF has to be unlocked first. Save a copy without the password, then use the tool.
• One PDF at a time, and PDF only.
• Very large pages, such as posters and plans, are drawn at a lower resolution, because one page image is capped at 16 megapixels.

Fake Scanner: When It Helps

Use it when you filled in or signed a form on screen and the other side expects a scanned copy. It also helps when no printer or scanner is at hand, when you want to save paper, and for props, mockups and teaching material that should look like paper.

Need a signature first? Draw one and place it on the form. For plain gray or black and white without the scan look, use PDF to black and white. To scan real paper with a phone camera, try the online document scanner. This tool does not sign, stamp or certify anything. Whether someone accepts the result as a scan is up to them and their rules.

Frequently Asked Questions

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