Handwritten declaration formatter

The fourth upload nobody warns you about

IBPS applications need a photograph, a signature, a left thumb impression and a declaration that you have copied out by hand on white paper. The declaration has its own specification — 800 × 400 pixels, between 50 and 100 KB — and that 2:1 shape is where it goes wrong. Feed it to any ordinary resizer and it crops to fit, which takes the last line of your writing off. The portal accepts the file. A human reads it later and sees an incomplete declaration.

Two things go wrong before you even get to the resize

The first is angle. Everybody photographs the sheet lying on a desk, holding the phone at whatever angle is comfortable, so the lines run downhill by three or four degrees. This tool measures that tilt from your own handwriting: rotating text into alignment makes the row-by-row darkness profile spiky — every line of writing becomes a peak and every gap a trough — so the correct angle is the one that maximises that spikiness. It searches half a degree at a time and then refines to a tenth.

The second is light. A phone photograph of white paper is not white; it is grey-brown with the phone's own shadow across one corner, because the camera exposes for the whole scene rather than for the page. The fix is to estimate the lighting and divide it out. A heavily shrunk copy of the photo, scaled back up, is a very good approximation of the illumination — at that scale the letters have disappeared and only the shadow gradient remains. Dividing the original by it leaves the ink and removes the shadow.

Then, and only then, the resize

The cleaned page is cropped to your writing, scaled to fit 800 × 400 with white filling whatever is left over, and encoded at the highest quality that stays under 100 KB. If it lands below the 50 KB floor the file is padded with a JPEG comment block, which changes the size without touching the image.

The one thing this cannot fix

IBPS rejects declarations written in block capitals, and it rejects declarations that were typed. It has to be your ordinary running hand, because the point of the exercise is comparing it against your handwriting at the exam centre. No amount of image processing changes that — if you have written it in capitals, write it again.

Before you photograph it

Use a plain white unruled sheet and a blue or black pen, put it on a flat surface, and stand so your own shadow is not across the page. Fill the frame with the sheet rather than the desk. The straightening and whitening here are a rescue, not a substitute — a good photograph produces a much more legible 800 × 400 result than a bad one that has been cleaned up.