Find the dots your printer hid on the page DOTS
Colour laser printers hide pale yellow dots on every page that encode the serial number and often the date. Scan a page and this finds, reads and removes them. What the dots are, and which printers add them.
The scan
A colour scan of a printed page at 600 dpi, as PNG or JPEG. It never leaves this tab.
Lower finds fainter dots and more specks of noise; higher is stricter. The middle is right for most scans.
What is on the page
Every dot found is marked in blue on the scan.
Check the cleaned copy before you rely on it; a dot printed over ink may leave a mark.
How it works
Most colour laser printers and colour copiers have printed a faint grid of yellow dots on every page since the 1990s. The pattern encodes the printer's serial number and often the date and time. Scan a printed page in colour at 600 dpi and DOTS finds the dots, shows the pattern, reads it where the layout is known, and writes a copy of the scan with them removed. Removing them from a scan does not make the paper original untraceable. Nothing is uploaded.
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