Compare PDF-Files

[ahofmann]

Hello,

i'm searching for an tool (mac and windows) where i can compare two pdf-files. The differences should be displayed in an additional page or document and must be marked, so the user could see it very easy.
Does anybody know such a tool and/or use it in his company?

Thank you.

kind regards
ahofmann

 

[zoran]

Adobe Acrobat has it, although my experience has been poor with it, mostly it choke and I could not get what I wanted.
This was with Acrobat 9, since there is Acrobat X, maybe it is improved but I did not have chance to test it yet.
Callas PDF toolbox has it too, I used trial version and it worked as advertised but I don't have extensive experience with it.

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Yes it works in Acrobat, and but you have to choose how to compare.
You can compare text or layout.
I have used it frequently when I need to touch up a file and want to make sure only what I intended to change has changed.
If you have jpg compression it can some times say something has changed which is just the artefacts that are created by JPG compression, but you get to view the original and a "difference" map displaying black what differs in that area.

If the files are generated from different computers you may find that it will react on structural differences that do not have any visual effect (eg comparing a PDF/x-1a to a PDF/x-4 may give say a page has no match yet the pages are identical, if there is transparency that flattens the whole page in the PDF/x-1a)

Try it and see if it works for you. I guess you could make a script to place multiple pages of the one in an InDesign file and the other in a second layer, and then turn the top layer to transparency difference, but test the build in command first

 

[erks]

Try Pdf Comparer. It is the best for batch comparing pdf files.

 

[mattbeals]

Acrobat is a great way to do it. callas pdfToolbox and pdfToolbox Server can compare documents as well. If you set up a Switch workflow with pdfToolbox Server you can batch process. Or you can feed it from the command line.