Comparing pdf documents

I receive multiple copies of pdf documents from different sources and many
times they differ by just a few pages. (that is, 1 set has 1 or 2 extra
pages that the first set did not). Does anyone know of a program that can
actually compare 2 pdf documents and determine if pages are missing? I have
seen many programs that compare by text, but they compare page 1 of a file
to page 1 of another file. If the pages are not in the same order, the
comparison is useless. Thanks

Hi David,
I have the same question! Were you ever able to figure out a solution? Do you know if there is a way to add a page to get them back on track?
thanks for any insight you might have!
Beth

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Acrobat Compare Documents: "Acrobat could not compare the documents completely."

There is a bug with Acrobat X and XI Pro that does not allow you to compare PDF documents created from unknown applications. We use XMetaL Author Enterprise and Acrobat considers it an unknown application. You can verify the application setting of your PDF from File > Properties.
I entered a bug report with Adobe on 4 April 2013.
To work around this bug, you can save the PDFs as Word documents and create new PDFs from Word before comparing them in Acrobat. The new PDFs have Microsoft Word associated with them and compare successfully.
Open a PDF to compare.
From the File menu, select Save As Other > Microsoft Word > Word Document.
Save the file to your computer.
In Windows Explorer, right-click the Word document and select Convert to Adobe PDF.
Save the file to your computer.
Repeat Step 1 through Step 5 for the second PDF to compare.
Compare the new PDFs (View > Compare Documents).
These steps are also useful to convert a PDF to a Word document, if that format is needed.
Hope this helps others! If anyone has another way around this issue, I am interested to hear.

This bug still exists in Acrobat 11.0.09.
I have not been contacted about my bug report, either.
It would be optimal to have this fixed in the product and not need the workaround I documented above.

Comparing 2 PDF documents text - differnet results in 8.2 and 9.0 versions of Professional

I am trying to compare 2 PDF Documents - Text. When I compare it in Version 8.2 of Adobe Professional using the right Options and selecting text compare. It compares the two documents perfectly fine and give me the right difference results.
When I compare the same 2 PDF documents - text in 9.0. It give me a totally different results. It treats the PDFs as Image and doesn't compare and produce right and clean way as 8.2. Do you know the reason why this is happening in 9.0.
Ideally all the functionality that is being supported in 8.2 should be supported in 9.0 Right??

I am trying to compare 2 PDF Documents - Text. When I compare it in Version 8.2 of Adobe Professional using the right Options and selecting text compare. It compares the two documents perfectly fine and give me the right difference results.
When I compare the same 2 PDF documents - text in 9.0. It give me a totally different results. It treats the PDFs as Image and doesn't compare and produce right and clean way as 8.2. Do you know the reason why this is happening in 9.0.
Ideally all the functionality that is being supported in 8.2 should be supported in 9.0 Right??

Compare two secured PDF documents

Hi,
I am using a licensed version of Adobe acrobat 11.0 professional. I have a requirement of comparing two secured PDF documents (which have the lock symbol displayed). But, the 'compare documents' option does not allow comparing two Secured PDFs. It gives a message 'This operation is not permitted'. Is there a way I can compare them ?
Earlier, I was using the version 5.0 in which we can compare secured documents without any problem.

Actually, its asking for a password when i tried to do that. So, is there a way to do it through the acrobat 11.0 tool itself ? (This feature of comparing secured documents was present in the versions 5.0 & 6.0. But, in later versions, it was removed)

How to programmatically compare two PDF documents.

We are in need of a solution related to comparing baselined and revised PDF documents, generally around 2-3 pages of content. Please note that I am looking for programatic comparison, ideally a dotnet based solution using Acrobat SDK. Any help will be highly appreciated.

Is there any recommendation considering there are no ways to programmatically compare two PDF's in .net. I noticed there are few solutions on Adobe site just like below but everyone seems to be stuck at the compare screen unable to simulate the Enter Key functionality.
      AcroAppClass acroApp1 = new AcroAppClass();
            acroApp1.Hide();
            AcroPDDocClass acrpDoc1 = new AcroPDDocClass();
            acrpDoc1.Open("c:\\MoreInformation.pdf");
            acrpDoc1.OpenAVDoc("BaseLine");
            AcroAppClass acroApp2 = new AcroAppClass();
            acroApp2.Hide();
            AcroPDDocClass acrpDoc2 = new AcroPDDocClass();
            acrpDoc2.Open("c:\\MoreInformation1.pdf");
            acrpDoc2.OpenAVDoc("Revised");
            AcroAVDoc avDoc = new AcroAVDoc();
            AcroAppClass acroMainApp = new AcroAppClass();
            acroMainApp.MenuItemExecute("DIGSIG:CompareDocuments");
            avDoc = (AcroAVDoc)acroMainApp.GetActiveDoc();
            Acrobat.CAcroPDDoc acrpDiffDoc = (Acrobat.CAcroPDDoc)avDoc.GetPDDoc();
            bool save = acrpDiffDoc.Save((short)PDSaveFlags.PDSaveFull, "c:\\compared.pdf");

How to compare two PDF documents?

Hi i need to compare two PDF documents. Is there any way to do this using javascript or applescript.or SDK
Im new to PDF scripting...
Please someone help me.....
thanks in advance....
Subha

Need to compare the difference between two PDF which should include font, style, text, spelling comparision and need to produce the report which should tell the difference.

Transparent the background or compare 2 pdf documents

usully, the background of any pdf software is white.
I need transparent the backgroud of one pdf document.
I have an orgignal pdf document, I write a copy by MS word. I would like transparentize the copy, Then I can compare between the copy and the original.
Do you find any solution about transparent the background? Do you know any software pdf which can be transparentized?

A PDF page is not white - it's transparent. However in Acrobat or Adobe Reader you always see a white representation of the page, and that cannot be turned off.
You have two options - import one PDF into another as a layer, or open both files in another application (Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.).

Error message in Adobe Pdf in printer device panel when trying to create a pdf document. I have CS3

Error message in Adobe Pdf in printer device panel when trying to create a pdf document. I have CS3 Web Premium with Acrobat Professional 8. I use it fine on my old computer with Windows XP. I recently got a new laptop with Windows 7. I installed all my Adobe programs, and I think they are working. When I look at Adobe PDF in the device section of the Control Panel it looks okay. But when I try to print a Word, Photoshop, or HTML page in PDF, nothing happens. I have tried printing both as File>print and using the PDF tab on the top menu bar. I look at the device in the control panel and it has the yellow error warning symbol and suggests trying to troubleshoot. I look at the document list and it says status "error". When I try troubleshooting Windows suggests doing some Home Sharing and also suggests canceling the document I'm trying to print. I tried re-installing just Acrobat 8 from CS3 (and have to use Photoshop CS4 disk for shared documents I guess). I ran into a can't locate adobepdf_dll file, so did a web search on this issue and found a suggestion that I find and use the adobepdf_dll_64 file and may have to (I did have to) remove the "_64" for it to work. I think I successfully reinstalled using that dll file- no errors came up anyway. But still when I try printing/converting a photoshop, webpage, or word document into pdf, the pdf device in control panel still gives the error status on the document and gives the same troubleshooting advice. Help?

I just compared the properties between the two computers. On the old computer it has the port as "My Documents/*.pdf". On my new computer it lists the port as "LPT1". I tried changing the port to "Print as File", but when I try printing a photoshop picture as pdf, I get a "Access Denied". I then tried to create a new port on the device control panel. I tried to create a local port "My Documents/*.pdf" port but was denied. I ten tried to create a new port type and control panel asked for an INF file. I wonder if this is where my problem lies. Thoughts?

How to show more than one PDF-Documents

One more question to the gurus. Can anyone tell me how i can show more that one pdf-form without having to use the container-window in the sdk-example. i would like to open and show a number of pdf-documents and react e.g. when a form closes.

"Which option is the third one? You mean "Or, make an application with
one AcroPDF box in one form. Save it as an EXE (or whatever). You can
now run multiple copies of your application".
If this isn't clear, I'm not sure how to make it more clear, but I can
try.
Do you turn your application into an EXE today? Ok, then just start 3
copies. Don't you have three PDF viewers?
Aandi Inston"
i still do not understand... let me try to explain the application a little bit. i am developing an add-in for outlook. the user can open a main-form with a lot of information on it and e.g. a button edit pdf-document. after clicking the button a pdf-document is shown and the user can view and edit it. the user must be ablke to switch back to the main-form without closing the pdf-document and open an other one to compare the two...

Missing topics in pdf-document

Hello,
I am using RH 7 and creating WebHelp. I am also trying to create a pdf-document with the same content as the WebHelp. For some reason, the contents I specify for the pdf-document are only partly included in the pdf-document.
I use the TOC from the project where I have a some books without links (all the associated topics are included in the pdf-document all right), and one book with a link - these topics are not incuded in the pdf. All topics are included in the WebHelp without any problems.
So I am wondering if there is something that could prevent a topic from being included in a pdf-document? Does anybody know? And last, but not least, does anybody know how to solve this problem? I have compared the topics that are inclucded in the pdf with the ones that aren't, but I can't see any difference.
Thanks in advance for your reply!
Regards, Hanne
P.S. I have been through Printed Output on www.grainge.org without being able to find a solution.

Hi Peter,
Thanks for your suggestions, I am afraid I have not found a solution yet. Outputting to Word gave the same problem.
The TOC in the output is in fact different from the TOC in the TOC editor in the sense that missing topics are missing from both the TOC and the "body" of the output. Sorry if I did not make that clear in my first post.
I have a feeling that I must be doing somthing wrong in the Chapter Layout part of the wizard for printed documentation. I have tried creating the books from scratch (by creating and renamingnthem) to see if that would help but it did not. My topics are not imported from Word; they have, however, at some point been imported as htm-files from another project as far as I remember.
The real mystery about it is that my pdf output worked all right in an earlier version of the project. My current project is a copy of that project. I am not aware of having changed anything in the pdf settings, and they look exactly the same (I have compared the settings field by field).
Do you have any suggestions for a way of "resetting" all pdf settings, or should I perhaps try to import the .hhc file from my previous project where they pdf is correct?
Thanks in advance!
Regards, Hanne

After installing Adobe Reader 9.1.3, PDF document referenced in an IFRAME won't display

My company writes software that generates PDF files and then displays them in either a FRAME or IFRAME. For one of our customers, for the users that have Adobe Reader 9.1.3 installed, if we programatically set the src of an IFRAME to a PDF, the content of the IFRAME just stays blank. But if they browse elsewhere from within our software and try loading the exact same PDF document in a FRAME, it loads fine. Our customer's users that are experiencing the problem are running on Windows XP SP3 using Internet Explorer 7 with Adobe Reader 9.1.3.
I've installed 9.1.3 on my Windows Server 2003 developer machine and I do not experience the problem. I had the customer send me screen shots of all of the IE settings in the Advanced tab and for the appropriate zone in the Security tab. I changed all of my settings to match and still could not replicate the problem.
I'm not sure what else to have the customer try. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

In case anyone else runs into this problem, I wanted to make sure that the solution got posted. When comparing all of the Advanced Settings and Security Settings, one thing was missed. Our customer was accessing the site using https while in our attempt to duplicate the problem, we were not. The setting that was causing the problem was the Advanced Setting of "Do not save encrypted pages to disk". If that is checked while browsing to a site using https, the described issue results.

When I compare 2 documents Acrobat 9 crashes

When I compare 2 documents the progress bar will come up and will not disappear. Eventually the following error will appear
Acrobat.exe - application error
The instruction at "0x0000195a" referenced memory at "0x0000195a". The memory could not be "written".
The above error also comes up if I click on the Progress bar for Document Compare.
Acrobat then crashes. We are running Acrobat Pro 9.5, and have this happening on multiple machines
Thanks

Hi, I have had a similar problem in Acrobat 10.1.9.22 for *specific files*, and talking to the Adobe tech support, they were also able to reproduce the crash with Acrobat 11 with these files, so it sounds like this bug is definitively not fixed yet.
The bug:
- When comparing 2 documents (View | Compare documents...), after some progress, Acrobat crashes (on my Windows 7 machine, it says "the application stopped working", the exception reported for me is c0000005 which is according to Google a memory access violation code). This will happen only on some *specific* .pdf documents (though it will be systematic for these). I am able to compare other .pdf documents fine without any issue.
** Current workaround** (thanks to tech support about this): You basically 'clean up' these bad .pdf documents by converting them to postscript and then back to pdf:
Instructions for Acrobat X:
For each document, do:
1) File | Save as | More options | PostScript
2) Then (in Windows at least), right click on the .ps file and choose "Convert to Adobe PDF" to convert it back to .pdf.
Now the convert the two documents should work fine with these 'refreshed' documents (hopefully).

Acrobat 9 ReduceFileSize chokes on PPT PDF document

Hi folks,
just printed a .ppt file created w/ MS PowerPoint 2008 Mac to disk (as .pdf document). When I tried to reduce the file size of this .pdf in Acrobat Pro 9.3, an error msg came up:
"An error was encountered while processing images."
Now I reopened that same .ppt file w/ MS PowerPoint 2004 Mac and printed it to disk (as .pdf document). When I tried to reduce the file size of this .pdf document w/ the same Acrobat app, the process was successful. Any clues?
Why can't Acrobat 9.3 reduce the file size of .pdf documents that were originally created with PPT2008, but is able to do so if the .pdf is derived from PPT2004???
- HaMü -

HI Hamu
Thanks for your response. I spent way too much time on this today compared to what it was worth, and your post was similar to another that I found. I followed some of the advice for using the optimiser from the following URL and was able to optimise the document from about 3 Mb to 1.5 Mb without the optimiser choking. Give it a go...
Markoui
http://www.appligent.com/talkingpdf-understandingacrobatsoptimizer

Pdf complete does not always create a correct pdf document

The HP Z230 I bought recently was equipped with PDF Complete to print to a pdf file. Unfortunately, it is inferior to the freeware CutePDF, in that sometimes it doesn't convert all of the letters in the document, and the font is strange.
I've made print out pdf files using PDF Complete and CutePDF to compare the two outputs. If somone from HP can point me to a place where I can upload both, you'll see the problem. The source from each file was another pdf document on a CD.
Terry Quinn

Hello @TerryQ,
Welcome to the HP Forums, I hope you enjoy your experience! To help you get the most out of the HP Forums I would like to direct your attention to the HP Forums Guide First Time Here? Learn How to Post and More.
I understand that you are having difficulty with the PDF writer on your HP Z230 Desktop Workstation. I am sorry, but to get your issue more exposure, I would suggest posting it in the commercial forums, since this is a commercial product. You can do this at Workstations - z series, xw series, and legacy x and w series.
I hope this helps. Thank you for posting on the HP Forums. Have a great day!
Please click the "Thumbs Up" on the bottom right of this post to say thank you if you appreciate the support I provide!
Also be sure to mark my post as “Accept as Solution" if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others who face the same challenge find the same solution.
Dunidar
I work on behalf of HP
Find out a bit more about me by checking out my profile!
"Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong." ~ Donald Porter

Certain PDF documents not spotlight-indexed nor copy/paste to TextEdit

Hello,
I've got a problem with certain PDF documents and Preview.app. I can read them perfectly by eye (I understand there's an overlying image?) but the text characters, when copied and pasted into TextEdit, are little rectangles with a tiny alien face (?) inside. TextEdit states the font is "LastResort", but doesn't allow to change the font, nor can I save the TextEdit document ("UTF-8 cannot be used for saving the document").
The worst about all is that Spotlight doesn't recognise the PDF files, they are not indexed, so I cannot search for text inside.
I tried to open the PDF document with Adobe Reader, which opens the document, copies and pastes into TextEdit without a problem, so I believe the problem must be on the Preview.app and/or System end.
Any solution, or is this a bug? Thanks for any help!

Any solution, or is this a bug?
I think this has to do with the way some pdf files are constructed, mapping text to the Unicode Private Use Area (reflected by those Last Resort symbols you see) plus shortcomings of Preview compared to Adobe Reader. The only fix is to use the latter, and tell Apple you want Preview improved:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Comparing pdf documents

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