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I am looking for an application to compare two PDF files.
Diff tool for Mac without saving text to files [closed]. Up vote 13 down vote favorite. I use meld on Linux and I am able to compare two pieces of text without having to save them in files. Is there something similar for Mac and Windows? I've been a user of BBEdit for years, which also has a diff tool. BBEdit is not free however. 'Compare up to 4 files together side-by-side' is the primary reason people pick vimdiff over the competition. This page is powered by a knowledgeable community that helps you make an informed decision. One of the few diff tools that works with more than just text and image files, Araxis Merge lets you also compare office documents (like MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or ODF). For people working on both Windows and Mac, it's great to know that a single license is valid for both platforms.
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Application must:
- be able to highlight differences between the two documents
- be mac-compatible as I will be using it on a mac
- be free, I do not want to spend any money
I will be mostly using this for comparing the new versions of the apple developer license agreements (since I am an apple developer who is too lazy to read a 40+ page document every time a minor change is made)
The application does not need to be from the App Store, nor does it need to need to be official (some knockoff from GitHub will be fine as long as it does not contain any viruses or bundled crapware) all I need is for it to do what it is intended to do (compare PDF's) very well.
If you would like to go above and beyond, free to take on the challenge of developing the application yourself (or modifying an existing one).
I won't use this application very often and will accept it in any of the following formats:
- Mac app store app
- Java app
- Web app
- AppleScript file (I will need to see the source code)
- Automator workflow
- basically anything that will run on Mac OS X Yosemite (non-beta) and perform the intended task effectively
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5 Answers
You can use DiffNow:
- it's free
- web-app diff tool
- works via pasting text; uploading files; using URLs
The only limitation is that files must be < 2048kb.
The sample on their site (first pdf vs. second pdf):
Tom5,85388 gold badges2828 silver badges5656 bronze badges
Free File Compare Tool For Mac
ᔕᖺᘎᕊᔕᖺᘎᕊ4,62366 gold badges2929 silver badges5959 bronze badges
compare
(command from ImageMagick)
If you want to compare the visual appearance of page 4 of
a.pdf
with page 6 of b.pdf
, you can use ImageMagick's command line tool compare
. Here is a variation of commands to try:(ImageMagick's frame/page counting is zero-based; so '
[3]
' means 'page 4'...) This will create 'delta' documents, where each pixel that is different between the pages is painted in red:- The first variant keeps a pale version of
a.pdf
as a background image to the page. - The second variant uses a resolution of
300 PPI
(instead of the default72 PPI
). - The third variant creates a white+red delta only (leaving away the pale background).
- The fourth variant does mark as red only those pixels which have a color difference of more than 5%.
It should be noted, that the comparison only works if the respective page sizes for the compared files are exactly identical.
diffpdf
(GUI application)
DiffPDF
is a GUI application which can process 2 or 3 PDF input and show the differences:- There is a mode that compares text content only, highlighting word and character differences.
- There is another mode that compares visual differences and highlights them.
The home page only offers a paying Windows version now, but earlier versions were free. You can grab the source code e.g. from Debian, it includes compilation instructions for OS X.
unor5,13344 gold badges2828 silver badges8585 bronze badges
Kurt PfeifleKurt Pfeifle
DiffPDF nowadays is an paid software for Windows only, but it was previously free and also available for OS X. You can still download such a previous version.
It allows both visual and textual comparison.
Michael SchmidMichael Schmid
Free File Compare Tool
When comparing PDF files, you have the choice between:
- comparing the contents (i.e. the actual text)
- comparing the pages as a whole (visual comparison).
While you might be looking for the first type of comparison, I wanted to offer a way to compare two PDF files page-by-page.
As I've had this requirement regularly in the past, and couldn't find the necessary software to perform the comparison, I wrote my own and made it available on GitHub. It's called pyPdfCompare and is available free of charge.
It runs fine on OS X and Windows but does require you to install Python 3, Ghostscript and ImageMagick. Furthermore, you'll need to perform a
pip install
for the libraries it uses.It may be a little too technical and/or not exactly what you were looking for, but I wanted to offer the option anyway, for the sake of completeness.
Tom5,85388 gold badges2828 silver badges5656 bronze badges
ƘɌỈSƬƠƑƘɌỈSƬƠƑ
For your use case, comparing the text and discarding all formatting and non-text elements would work well. You can run the
pdftotext
utility on each file and then a text comparison tool on the result. On OS X, you can install pdftotext
from various free software distribution channels such as Brew or MacPorts, it's part of the poppler
package.Free File Compare Tool Download
Cas Cremers's
pdfdiff.py
script automates the running of pdftotext
(which needs to be installed separately) and of a diff viewer (ditto).The result is similar to DiffNow cited by ᔕᖺᘎᕊ, I think they use
pdftotext
internally and plug the output into a text diff webapp.Community♦
GillesGilles3,90133 gold badges2323 silver badges4242 bronze badges