To compare PDF files, select two different PDF documents via the File #1 and File #2 buttons then click Compare. You can also save your comparison result as a PDF file. The program runs on multi platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Best PDF Editors for Mac #1. PDFelement 6 is all about giving businesses the efficiency they crave when it comes to the world of PDF documents. Talk of creating, converting, editing, annotating and sharing PDF documents with the utmost professionalism.
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Two things I've learned from this hint:
1) My beloved FileMerge can diff PDFs.
2) There's a command line tool to initiate it, which is superb!
The Binaries for xpdf can be found here: http://users.phg-online.de/tk/MOSXS/
(At the bottom).
I am trying to run PDF Resizer and cannot resize it because it has MacRoman encoding. Any method to bypass these or change them to other encoding via commandline??
Thanks
VNiks
Here's how you can change the file encoding attribute to be correct:
(Boldly taken from here.)
This is a nice hint for comparing PDFs, but why would a university instructor require students to turn in PDFs? Why not just use RTF? Open with Microsoft Word and compare documents (my university and most others will give you Office, no?). i like to use Textmate and a misc bundle: [link]http://manual.macromates.com/en/bundles[/link] (w/ the diff command in the terminal).
I'm not the original submitter, but as a University lecturer I try to encourage my students not to rely on Office, especially for technical documents. Writing a long, consistent, well formatted technical report or thesis, with equations, figures, table of contents and bibliography is a very difficult exercise with MS-Word in my experience (although I have done it). In contrast it is much easier with tools like LaTeX. Nowadays LaTeX's output format is PDF.
As a sidenote, MS-Word is a reasonable tool for collaborative documents.
RTF is of course not at all suited to such documents.
/SumatraPDF-5baaa592c9e77c0025d8e21a.jpg "Tool")
PDF to TXT - There's an app for that -- well, actually an automator action.
Open Automator, select Application, Look for PDF in the left hand pane, then Extract PDF Text , drag to the Application Window, then save as an application. Now drop a PDF file on top of the app icon.
Hi,
does ediff in Aquamacs also work with PDF files?
I tried to load to pdf files with the compare (ediff) command, but I don't see how to display the differences and I get an error message saying:
Binary files /var/folders/FX/FXr0KhAz2RWkK++BYv0W1++++TU/-Tmp-/Filename1.pdf and /var/folders/FX/FXr0KhAz2RWkK++BYv0W1++++TU/-Tmp-/Filename2.pdf differ
I never used Emacs or Aquamacs before, so I don't know if I'm doing something wrong?!
used version:
This is GNU Emacs 22.1.50.1 (i386-apple-darwin8.9.1, Carbon Version 1.6.0)
of 2007-06-06 on plume.sr.unh.edu - Aquamacs Distribution 1.0a
On MacOS 10.6.5
Thanks for this great hint!
However, unfortunately I can't make it work on my computer:
I did how you suggested and the Shell script works (when executed in the terminal), so it is able to convert a pdf to a text file.
However, if I try the opendiff command or try to open 2 pdf files in FileMerge, nothing happens.
Console output:
30.01.11 16:09:01 login[84242] DEAD_PROCESS: 84242 ttys000
30.01.11 16:09:47 [0x0-0x2cc2cc].com.apple.FileMerge[84367] ~/bin/convert_pdf_to_macroman_text.sh: line 2: pdftotext: command not found
30.01.11 16:09:47 [0x0-0x2cc2cc].com.apple.FileMerge[84367] ~/bin/convert_pdf_to_macroman_text.sh: line 2: pdftotext: command not found
30.01.11 16:09:47 FileMerge[84367] *** Assertion failure in -[DiffItem initWithDiffDescriptor:], /SourceCache/FileMerge/FileMerge-1633/DiffItem.m:65
30.01.11 16:09:47 FileMerge[84367] unexpected file diff result at line 0
xpdf and poppler are up to date (acc. to macports, at least)
I'm using Mac OS 10.6.5.
Can anybody help?
Kind regards
Martin
The 'pdftotext' binary has been renamed to 'xpdf-pdftotext' in the macports xpdf install.
So try using 'xpdf-pdftotext' instead of 'pdftotext' in that shell script, that should work.
Installing xpdf (or poppler) via Macports failed for me (dependencies from hell).
Instead, I simply installed a (universal) binary build of pdftotext that I found online - it was a few years old but did the job just fine, without having to install a crazy amount of additional packages.
http://www.reitter-it-media.de // personal: http://www.davids-welt.de
DiffPDF is a simple but effective free Windows utility that identifies changes and differences between PDF files. Visually comparing PDFs to identify changes or differences is harder than it sounds, and it sounds hard enough, not to mention extremely boring. But it's all too easy to miss subtle differences with the Mark I Eyeball, and some changes might not be visible at all. Why put yourself through it when there's a free tool that can do the job for you, only much faster and more thoroughly? It's called DiffPDF, and it's from RubyPDF Technologies. With dual file selection tools and display panes, this efficient tool makes quick work of a tedious but necessary job.
In addition to side-by-side main views and file browsers, DiffPDF has a right-hand control panel that includes a log display as well as access to Help, About, and Options. One neat feature is the ability to pop out each section of controls into separate dialogs that we could drag and place anywhere on the desktop. You can set DiffPDF to compare appearance or text, zoom in or out, and navigate through multiple documents, but most of what this tool does, it does automatically when you press Compare. We opened two random multipage PDFs from our test folder, one in File No. 1 and the other in File No. 2. We pressed Compare, and the tool very rapidly highlighted every difference in each view, recording the details in the log. Next we opened identical copies of a single document. DiffPDF displayed a message in each window stating that the documents appeared to be identical. We made some small changes and reran the tool. DiffPDF identified and logged the new changes.
DiffPDF is a highly specific tool that does a highly specific job, and most people probably won't need it. But if you find yourself editing and comparing PDFs the hard way, you'll appreciate this simple freeware.