Looking for Traces
If you don't have the right tools, comparing PDF documents for differences can be very cumbersome. We discuss five nifty tools that can help with this task.
Finding differences in PDF documents
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MattTrommer, 123RF
The portable document format, or PDF, has become indispensable as a way to exchange data across various platforms and operating systems. This is especially true for documents that should be readable but not easy to modify.
In this article, I will examine how to determine whether two PDF documents are identical and, if they are not, how to find what differences in content and appearance exist. In particular, I will look at five programs including Md5sum [1], Pdftotext [2], Pdfdiff [3], Comparepdf [4] and DiffPDF [5], all of which can be found in the Ubuntu repositories and that of most over distributions.
Comparing Files
Md5sum can be found on every Linux system. In Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu, you will find it in the coreutils [6] package. The primary purpose of Md5sum is to generate 128-bit long hash values based on the MD5 method. In simplified terms, this type of hash value corresponds to the digital fingerprint of a data set.
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