• File Diff Tool For Windows
• Best Diff Tool For Windows
• Diff Tools Mac
• Win Diff
• Examdiff

Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers. Meld helps you compare files, directories, and version controlled projects. It provides two- and three-way comparison of both files and directories, and has support for many popular version control systems. Files Compare is a visual tool for files and directories comparison. It helps you to compare and merge different versions of the same textual file.

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?

Asad Iqbal

File Diff Tool For Windows

Asad Iqbal

closed as off topic by martin clayton, ollo, Mario Sannum, robbrit, Laurent EtiembleApr 4 '13 at 21:47

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Best Diff Tool For Windows

3 Answers

NotePad++ with the Compare plugin on Windows:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/npp-compare/

AnneAnne

TextWrangler for OS X does a nice diff of either files on disk or documents being edited.

That would allow you to make two empty docs, paste your text into each of them and run the diff.

MonoloMonolo

The meld tool has been ported to Mac OS X and is available via 'fink'.

You will need to install fink first however, and I believe you can get started here.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged macosdiff or ask your own question.

I am looking for an application to compare two PDF files.

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

TomDeveloperACEDeveloperACE

5 Answers

You can use DiffNow:

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• 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):

Tomᔕᖺᘎᕊᔕᖺᘎᕊ

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:

1. The first variant keeps a pale version of a.pdf as a background image to the page.
2. The second variant uses a resolution of 300 PPI (instead of the default 72 PPI).
3. The third variant creates a white+red delta only (leaving away the pale background).
4. 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:

1. There is a mode that compares text content only, highlighting word and character differences.
2. 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.

unor

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.

F secure flashback removal tool for mac. When comparing PDF files, you have the choice between:

Diff Tools Mac

• 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.

Win Diff

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.

Tom

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.

Cas Cremers's pdfdiff.py script automates the running of pdftotext (which needs to be installed separately) and of a diff viewer (ditto).

Examdiff

The result is similar to DiffNow cited by ᔕᖺᘎᕊ, I think they use pdftotext internally and plug the output into a text diff webapp.

GillesGilles

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged osxpdfcomparison or ask your own question.