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In a previous job, I had to validate the output of an unreliable production publishing system, so I tested dozens of PDF comparison tools available at the time. The best I found was called Delta Walker. It was proprietary commercial Mac-only software, but reasonably inexpensive, accurate, and could handle long PDFs with lots of graphics well.

I remember evaluating this diff-pdf tool and finding that it fell short in some way, although it's been so long that I don't recall the specifics. Most of them failed to identify changes or reported false positives. I also remember being disappointed since this one was open source and could easily be scripted.



It looks like Delta Walker's added Windows and Linux support: https://www.deltawalker.com/download


I found "Draftable" to be great


Wouldn’t exporting pages to images and using pixel diff accurately identify differences in PDF’s?


I guess it depends on the use case. Imagine adding an extra sentence in the second PDF, and this causes the paragraph to have 6 instead of 5 lines, and the next paragraph begins a line further down, and the last paragraph of that page ends up in the next page, etc...


Thanks. That helped understand it better.




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