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Comment by progbits | Hacker News Reader

I've had a project idea similar to this in the backlog for years: personalized signature generator that can be used to deal with dinosaurs that still want printed, scanned and signed documents.

Basically I want to take a pdf, turn it into fake scan image (add noise, some inkjet smear lines, random skew etc procedurally), then generate signature image to paste over that. Zero dead trees and screaming at printers involved.

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Apart from the signature generation, here is another project that does the false-scanning and signature pasting : https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/falsisign

These fake-scanner pdf generators always use a huge skew. A tiny (random) bit of skewing makes it seem more genuine, but using the same exact large rotation puts it in an uncanny valley.

https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/falsisign/-/blob/master/fals.... Well the skew is random between 0 and 2 degrees.

You might as well make a scan of your actual signature and make the generator overlay the image instead.

It is trivially recognizable in PDF viewers like Adobe Reader that a signature image was pasted in (the image rectangle around the signature highlights), and can therefore be rejected as not being a genuine signature, unless you turn the whole page into an image to make it look like a scan.

Make a very high-quality noise-free image of your signature, with a transparent background. Drop it onto an equally high-quality PDF and skew it a bit. Add some toner noise to the whole image and skew the image a small bit.

I think you can make it look decent. Haven't tried it though.

MacOS Preview app has a handy feature to add a signature via the trackpad or camera and then just paste it into any PDF.

Just yesterday I scanned my signature and added it to Adobe Reader. It even automatically made it transparent in a correct way. It didn’t add noise though.

I scanned my signature at high resolution from blank white paper, cleaned it up a little with Paint.net, and made the white areas transparent. Pasting that into documents has saved me a lot of hassle.

Legally I'm pretty sure you could also just draw an X on there and you'd be fine.

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