fakescan 1.0.0

Make a PDF look like it was printed and scanned

fakescan

Make a PDF look like it was printed on paper and scanned back.

Effects

• Random per-page rotation (misaligned paper feed)
• Vignette / corner darkening (scanner lamp falloff)
• Gaussian noise (sensor grain)
• Warm paper tint (cream/yellowish whites)
• Uneven left-right illumination (scanner lamp gradient)
• Slight blur (halftone + scanner softness)
• Subtle contrast and sharpness reduction

Requirements

System dependency (provides pdftoppm):

# macOS
brew install poppler

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install poppler-utils

Installation

pip install fakescan

Usage

CLI

fakescan input.pdf                      # writes input_scanned.pdf
fakescan input.pdf output.pdf           # custom output name
fakescan input.pdf --dpi 150            # lower DPI = smaller file
fakescan input.pdf output.pdf --dpi 300 # high quality

Python API

from fakescan import make_printed_pdf

make_printed_pdf("input.pdf", "output.pdf", dpi=200)

Or apply effects to a single PIL image:

from PIL import Image
from fakescan import apply_printed_effect

img = Image.open("page.png")
scanned = apply_printed_effect(img, page_index=0)
scanned.save("page_scanned.png")

License

MIT