Print? Sign? Scan? Nah.

13 Jul, 2022

In early 2020, as we all went into lockdown, some institutions still clung to the ritual of print, sign, scan. As if owning a home printer were a sign of legitimacy. For those of us living fully digital lives, it felt absurd.

So I decided to fake the process. I placed my signature, saved as an SVG, into the document, then used this tiny shell script to make the PDF appear as if it had been printed and scanned. It adds a bit of rotation, gray-scale, and noise. Just enough to fool the bureaucracy.

Since I'm still using it, here’s the script:

#!/bin/sh
ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5))
magick -density 150 $1 \
  -linear-stretch '1.5%x2%' \
  -rotate ${ROTATION} \
  -attenuate '0.01' \
  +noise Multiplicative \
  -colorspace 'gray' $2