Tool to compare large numbers of PDF files? [closed]

Answer 1

I've used a home-baked script which

• converts all pages on two PDFs to bitmaps
• colors pages of PDF 1 to red-on-white
• changes white to transparent on pages of PDF 2
• overlays each page from PDF 2 on top of the corresponding page from PDF 1
• runs conversion/coloring and overlaying in parallel on multiple cores

Software used:

• GhostScript for PDF-to-bitmap conversion
• ImageMagick for coloring, transparency and overlay
• inotify for synchronizing parallel processes
• any PNG-capable image viewer for reviewing the result

Pros:

• simple implementation
• all tools used are open source
• great for finding small differences in layout

Cons:

• the conversion is slow
• major differences between PDFs (e.g. pagination) result in a mess
• bitmaps are not zoomable
• only works well for black-and-white text and diagrams
• no easy-to-use GUI

I've been looking for a tool which would do the same on PDF/PostScript level.

Here's how our script invokes the utilities (note that ImageMagick uses GhostScript behind the scenes to do the PDF->PNG conversion):

$ convert -density 150x150 -fill red -opaque black +antialias 1.pdf back%02d.png
$ convert -density 150x150 -transparent white +antialias 2.pdf front%02d.png
$ composite front01.png back01.png result01.png # do this for all pairs of images

Answer 2

I think your best approach would be to convert the PDF to images at a decent resolution and than do an image compare.

To generate images from PDF you can use Adobe PDF Library or the solution suggested at Best way to convert pdf files to tiff files.

To compare the generated TIFF files I found GNU tiffcmp (for windows part of GnuWin32 tiff) and tiffinfo did a good job. Use tiffcmp -l and count the number of lines of output to find any differences. If you are happy to have a small amount of content change (e.g. anti-aliasing differences) then use tiffinfo to count the total number of pixels and you can then generate a percentage difference value.

By the way for anyone doing simple PDF comparison where the structure hasn't changed it is possible to use command line diff and ignore certain patterns, e.g. with GNU diff 2.7:

diff --brief -I xap: -I xapMM: -I /CreationDate -I /BaseFont -I /ID --binary --text

This still has the problem that it doesn't always catch changes in generated font names.

Answer 3

Based on your needs, a convert to text solution would be the easiest and most direct. I did think the bitmap idea was pretty cool.

Answer 4

You can batch compare pdf files with Tarkware Pdf Comparer. But it's not free and requires Adobe Acrobat.

Answer 5

Because there is no such tool available that we have written one. You can download the i-net PDF content comparer and use it. I hope that help other with the same problem. If you have problems with it or you have feedback for us then you can contact our support.

Answer 6

We've also used pdftotext (see Sklivvz's answer) to generate ASCII versions of PDFs and wdiff to compare them.

Use pdftotext's -layout switch to enhance readability and get some idea of changes in the layout.

To get nice colored output from wdiff, use this wrapper script:

#!/bin/sh
RED=$'\e'"[1;31m"
GREEN=$'\e'"[1;32m"
RESET=$'\e'"[0m"
wdiff -w$RED -x$RESET -y$GREEN -z$RESET -n $1 $2