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Comment by dloss | Hacker News Reader

i-net PDFC is my favorite tool in this space (after having tried a dozen others). Awesome features, multi-platform. Free trial version and an online demo available. https://www.inetsoftware.de/products/pdf-content-comparer

Not affiliated in any way, just a happy user.

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And none of the other tools I've tried was significantly better than the old GPL-licensed version of DiffPDF: http://www.qtrac.eu/diffpdf-foss.html

Thanks for the comment! I think it's not too difficult to build something similar (even with a web server so you can make comparison on fly).

I'm playing with alpha compositing, I'm going to commit some little changes to enchant the experience a little bit.

Most important for me is the ability to ignore page boundaries. Removing the first half of the first page of one source document shouldn't produce differences on all following pages.

Thanks for the feedback. Should the user specify the page boundaries or does pdf-diff automatically checks where page boundaries are?

> It's automatic. As if there were no page boundaries, like in text diffs). But for a paged-based diff-tool it would already be quite useful, if the user could interactively specify pages to ignore, so that the comparison can start again where both docs are the same (e.g. at the start of the next chapter).

Gotcha. I might transform this project from a command-line only to a visual tool. I could implement that, thanks for the idea. I can actually have some sections of the PDF ignored.

It's automatic. As if there were no page boundaries, like in text diffs). But for a paged-based diff-tool it would already be quite useful, if the user could interactively specify pages to ignore, so that the comparison can start again where both docs are the same (e.g. at the start of the next chapter).

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