Why make a PDF look scanned?
Usually because someone asked for a scan. A landlord, an HR department or an exam board wants “a scanned copy of the signed form”, and you filled it in and signed it on your computer. Or a portal only accepts documents that look like paper, or you simply want a printed-and-scanned look for a design. You do not have a scanner, and printing the file just to scan it again wastes paper and an afternoon.
This tool does what the scanner would have done. Every page is drawn as a picture, laid slightly crooked on the “glass”, given the gray tone of real paper, the uneven light of a scanner lamp and the grain of its sensor, and saved as a grayscale JPEG inside a new PDF. The result looks like a page that went through an office scanner rather than a file that was typed.
What makes a page look scanned
We read the public code of the most popular open-source scanned-look tool. In its default mode it draws pages at 144 dpi, tilts every page by 1 to 1.5 degrees, and lays the same noise image over every page. That is a giveaway: paper never goes through a feeder at the same angle twice, and a sensor's grain is never identical from page to page. Here each page gets its own effects:
- Tilt — a different angle on every page, leaning either way. Slight is 0.15° to 0.6°; Noticeable is 0.6° to 1.5°.
- Paper and ink — white becomes a light gray of 241 to 247 (out of 255) and black is never quite black, as on a real scan.
- Light — a gentle brightness slope across the page and a slight fall-off toward the edges, like a scanner lamp.
- Grain — fresh sensor noise on every page, never the same pattern twice.
- Softness and dust — the slight blur of scanner optics, and a few specks of dust in different places on each page. An optional lid shadow darkens one edge.
Together they make pages that are related but not identical. In our test, the blank top corner of two pages of the same report differed by 10.8 gray levels on average, from paper tone and light alone, while the grain inside that corner varied by about 1.2 levels.
Photocopy pushes the page toward black and white (in our test only about 1% of the pixels were left in the middle grays) with a little toner noise. Color scan keeps colors on warm paper for pages with stamps, logos or highlighting.
The text stays searchable
Most scanned-look tools turn your document into pictures and nothing else: Ctrl+F finds nothing, nothing can be copied and a screen reader reads nothing. Office scanners with text recognition do better. They put an invisible copy of the text behind each page image, which is what people mean by a “searchable PDF”. This tool does the same, using the PDF's own text instead of guessing it from the picture, and tilts the hidden text with the page so it lines up with the printed words.
We checked both things:
- Nothing lost. On a 3-page report the text in the scanned-looking PDF was identical to the original, letter for letter and in the same order, and words the original had split with invisible hyphenation marks came out whole, so a search for “interoperability” finds them.
- Lined up. For 390 pieces of hidden text we sampled the page image under each one: 388 sat on printed ink. Shifted by just 9 pixels, the same check found ink under none of them, so the test does tell the difference. Pages turned 90, 180 and 270 degrees and a page with an offset crop box lined up too, as did Turkish, Polish, Cyrillic and Greek text.
If you would rather send pictures only, untick Keep the text searchable.
How big the file will be
A scan is a photo of every page, so it is always far bigger than the typed PDF. We measured three text documents:
| Look and resolution | Per page | 10 pages |
|---|---|---|
| Office scanner, 150 dpi | 144–318 KB | about 1.4–3.2 MB |
| Office scanner, 200 dpi (default) | 294–492 KB | about 2.9–4.9 MB |
| Office scanner, 300 dpi | 627–895 KB | about 6.3–9 MB |
| Color scan, 200 dpi | 315–491 KB | about 3.2–4.9 MB |
| Photocopy, 200 dpi | 402–586 KB | about 4–5.9 MB |
Pages full of small text are at the top of each range. The added grain is not what makes a scan large: the same page with no grain at all was within 3% of the size. What matters is how much text is on the page and the resolution. If a form limits uploads to 2 MB or so, choose 150 dpi, which still reads cleanly. Every result shows its size before you download it, and Compress PDF can shrink it further.
Gray pages are saved as true single-channel grayscale JPEGs, the way an office scanner saves them, rather than color JPEGs that only look gray. That does not make the file smaller, but it means a printer prints them with black ink only.
Use it honestly
Making a PDF look scanned changes how it looks, nothing else. When a form asks for a scanned copy, it usually wants proof that a real person signed it, so sign it first, for example with Sign PDF or by filling in the form, and keep the original. Do not use a scanned look to pass a document off as something it is not.
Everything happens inside your browser tab. The PDF is never uploaded, and there is no page limit, watermark or sign-in. Password-protected files need to be opened first with Unlock PDF. To go the other way and get the text out of a real scan or a PDF, use Extract Text from PDF.