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DiffPDF
Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2013 1:07 am
by billon
http://qtrac.eu/diffpdf.html
DiffPDF can compare two PDF files. It offers three comparison modes: Words, Characters, and Appearance.
By default the comparison is of the words on each pair of pages, but comparing character by character is also supported (e.g., for logographic languages). And there's also support for comparing the pages by appearance (for example, if a diagram is changed or if a paragraph is reformatted, or a font changed). It is also possible to compare particular pages or page ranges. For example, if there are two versions of a PDF file, one with pages 1-12 and the other with pages 1-13 because of an extra page having been added as page 4, they can be compared by specifying two page ranges, 1-12 for the first and 1-3, 5-13 for the second. This will make DiffPDF compare pages in the pairs (1, 1), (2, 2), (3, 3), (4, 5), (5, 6), and so on, to (12, 13).
DiffPDF is licensed under the GNU General Public License v 2 open source license.
Steven Lee has built a version for Windows. It is available from his blog
http://soft.rubypdf.com/software/diffpdf or from here
http://qtrac.eu/diffpdf-2.1.3-win32-static.zip (5.6MB; should work fine on both 32- and 64-bit Windows; SHA1: 87cc3de49466d3808fa04742aa1f8a884d42fd03).
Settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Qtrac Ltd.
Re: DiffPDF
Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2013 1:25 am
by tproli
Looks great, thanks.
Re: DiffPDF
Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2013 1:50 am
by Danix
We released
X-DiffPDF 2.1.2 [rev1] some time ago, a portable version of the software packaged in winPenPack's format.
Re: DiffPDF
Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2014 11:47 am
by webfork
v. 2.1.3 is out and WPP also posted a corresponding update:
http://www.winpenpack.com/en/download.php?view.1343
Moving over to the submission thread. Might add this as I've had a few occasions to test it and so far happy with it.
Re: DiffPDF
Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 11:37 am
by webfork
Old thread update:
I finally had occasion to test this and found an important limitation: the program requires a 1 to 1 relationship between your PDF files. Meaning for example if you have two exactly the same 10 page documents save for a blank page inserted before page 2, the rest of the documents will come up as different. The program isn't smart enough to notice that the data has just moved down slightly.
That said, I preferred it in some ways over Acrobat Pro 9's comparison tool, who's output wasn't terribly easy to understand.
There's also a PA version:
http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/diffpdf_portable
Re: DiffPDF
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2020 11:02 am
by lintalist
The portableapps version works well for me for some documents I had to compare, but of course YMMV as they say.
Just to note there is also a command line solution,
https://vslavik.github.io/diff-pdf/ (mac, linux, windows) but for some documents the files are significantly larger. I'll post a note in the CLI section for cross reference.