I was asked to sign and return some legal documents. Foxit and Adobe let you sign digitally with their signature stamp feature. But since these were legal documents I was asked for a real signature. I didn’t want to go down to the Officer Store to print, sign, and scan it, so I went back through some hn posts that showed how to fake a real signature.

This and this post show online services that do what you need. But since my documents had sensitive information I didn’t want to upload them. Reading the posts more, they had comments on how to do the same locally.

I first tried this command but it looked a bit too processed.

convert -density 150 -colorspace gray -linear-stretch 3.5%x10% -blur 0x0.5 -attenuate 0.25 +noise Gaussian -rotate 0.5 temp.pdf

I ended up going with this command that had more of a light touch to it.

gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOCACHE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=LeaveColorUnchanged -dAutoFilterColorImages=true -dAutoFilterGrayImages=true -dDownsampleMonoImages=true -dDownsampleGrayImages=true -dDownsampleColorImages=true -sOutputFile= temp.pdf

I didn’t expect that the PDF program you use to make the digital signature stamp with would have an impact. Between Foxit and Adobe, the later gives a much better result.

After spending all morning figuring this out, I was ready to send my pseudo signed and scanned document. I attached the document, then while typing my response I re-read the email and it said “Please provide an original signature”. This seemed like a weird way of saying a real signature, so after looking it up I learned that original signature is an actual legal term.

Was all this work was for waste? I spend an entire morning making a new environment, dealing with dependencies, keeping track of signatures and documents, only to realize it didn’t matter. A silver lining is that at least I read that line before submitting, instead of waiting for a response to get rejected again. And now if someone asks me to print and sign something I’ll be ready.

I went down to the Office Store to print the document out, which is usually empty, but this day there was a line to use the printers. What would usually take ~5 minutes ended up being almost an hour.

I have an HP multi-purpose inkjet printer. It never prints when I need it to, and I’ve only kept it for the scanner. Looking at both problems, I decided to go with the hn recommendation and get a Brother laser printer.

I almost went with a combo printer-scanner, then realized I scan a lot more than I print, and got them as separate devices. For the printer I went with a Brother HL-L2350DW.

For my scanner, the The New York Times Wirecutter series has a list of scanners, and I went with the Canon CanoScan Lide 300.

Both make getting stuff done a lot easier now. This type of office set up is kind of overkill for most, but when it comes to those few times I need it, it’s worth it.