Adobe Pro Compare Tool

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
March 19, 2021
1 reply
561 views

I have a user who is using the compare tool to compare two PDFs that are roughly 50 pages long. When running the compare tool on these two PDFs the compare process stops after page 5 and the rest of the PDF is un-checked for changes. If I extract pages 7-50 and run the compare the compare works fine. If I extract only page 6 from each and compare the compare tool works fine. The issue only seems to occur when we do a full compare of 1-50 and it hits page 6. If we click the checkbox for "Compare text only" then all 50 pages compare without issue. The user said that pages 5 and 6 of the PDFs are originally Word doc that has been converted to a PDF file and merged with the rest of the pages. Why would the compare tool stop working at page 6 for a normal scan and work fine when "compare only text" is enabled?

Edit and convert PDFs

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Thom Parker

Community Expert

There is probably a PDF content error on page 6. You might be able to discover more by trying to repair page 6 with a "save as optimized" or one of the preflight checks, or print to PDF. The Print to PDF does an analysis on the PDF that can show up issues that don't stop the PDF from being displayed.

Can you post page 6 here so we can see it?

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often

G

garyo75015755Author

Participant

Thank you for those suggestions Thom. Saving as optimized did not seem to help but re-printing the PDF using the Adobe PDF Printer resolved the issue. Once the PDF had been re-printed via the Adobe printer we were able to compare the PDFs without issue. The user that I am helping is curious about the "Compare text only" setting and was wondering why the compare would work with this setting enabled. She is ultimately wondering what does not get compared when that setting is enabled? Is it just spacing and layout items that are no longer compared?

Thom Parker

Community Expert

A PDF file is a very complex animal. From the user's perspective it's just graphics and text, so you might assume that text only means that the graphics are not compared, and this is true. But a compare can also compare the location items item on the screen, both text and graphics. And it can compare the content or file structure. For example, you can have two PDFs that look identical, but are completly different under the covers. A text compare or simple content compare would report the files are identical, but a structure compare would report that they are completely different.

I'm sure the error is occuring on the non-text only compare because of the structural problems I mentioned earlier.

Here's a video on the internals of a PDF:

https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/FreeStuff/AcroForm_Concepts/Part1g_WhatsPDF_mp4.cfm

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often

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