Trying to compare 2 PDFs, all tools find no differences... need help

M

Mizugori

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2004
Messages
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I am trying to compare 2 PDF documents - which are about 95% the same but there are a few changes here and there, and I really need to find them.

The documents are just text, no tables or images or other crap that could be interfering with this.

I have tried a few different programs including Draftable Compare and DiffPDF - but they all report NO DIFFERENCES.

The crazy part is you can clearly see in the preview panes, that there are differences (ie one document the first sentence on page 20 might read "20 notebook computers" in one version of the doc, but that line reads "20 laptops" in another version of the doc - yet all these compare PDF utilities don't seem to notice the difference.

Has anyone else run into this before? Any advice on how I can get it working?
 
I think Acrobat can do it..

PDFs are a bundle of crap in their behind the scenes formatting. Hells bells some PDF docs are actually just images and not even text! It's not easy peasy like a text doc.

It may be worth converting them out to something like a word doc then doing the compare.
 
I dont know about pdf's but notepad++ can scan for differences on two files.

If it doesnt work for pdfs and if the pdfs are not big then copy and paste them into a text file, so you have two text files and open with notepad++ and compare and it will highlight the different portions.
 
There's a software called IDM UltraCompare that will do this. You may or may not need to convert to .txt. Been a while since I've it.
 
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