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Bureaucracy sometimes requires us to print a document, fill in blank fields, sign it, scan it and send it back.  Is there an easy way to fool the bureaucrats when no printer or scanner are available?  I already found lookslikescanned.com (dead link) which allows you to make a PDF look liked scanned, but I still haven't figured out yet a way to generate fake handwriting on a PDF document as if it had been written with a pen on actual paper.

Historical note: here is what lookslikescanned.com looked like when it existed, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

Scott - Слава Україні
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Pablo Messina
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2 Answers2

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I have no idea what your bureaucrats are looking for specifically, but you could just:

  1. take a picture of your writing/signature written on real paper with a real pen
  2. use an editor (PDF or image editor like gimp) to add your small written images onto the PDF
Xen2050
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  • If I need to fill in many fields (not just signature), I guess I would have to write on paper all the text, take many pictures and treat them as many "signatures"? – Pablo Messina Feb 06 '19 at 17:11
  • Basically yes. But I'd imagine the signature would be the most important part that needs writing, almost everything else could be "typed" (with a fillable PDF or adding text), couldn't it? – Xen2050 Feb 06 '19 at 17:15
  • Good point, I should try that. The instructions said explicitly to print, write and scan, so I just assumed the bureaucrats at the other end were expecting everything handwritten, but maybe they can tolerate some typing as long as the signature is handwritten, I don't know. – Pablo Messina Feb 06 '19 at 19:37
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There is an online tool to make a pdf look scanned and it has the ability to insert signatures that look handwritten:

https://supertool.org/make-a-pdf-look-printed-and-scanned/

dca
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