Poor man's pdf diff tool
Recently a client shared updated requirement document, unfortunately the document was in PDF and I don’t want to go through 60+ pages of document for changes.
Then this crazy idea pop’s in my head, why can’t I do a diff on these pdf with a simple script. Reason is, I do not want to use any online tools, or want to install anything from Adobe.
The idea was to export the pdf to images and do a image diff in batch. I already have automator script to convert pdf to png and image magick installed on my machine.
- Step 1: Convert the pdf to png using the automator script
- Step 2: Batch rename the files like 1.png, 2.png etc.,
- Step 3: run
magick comparein batch using simple one-line shell script
for i in $(seq 62 $END); do magick compare ../v1/$i.png ../v2/$i.png diff-$i.png; done
Note: 62 is the no. of images in each directory. v1 & v2 are two directories with images in sequence eg., v1/1.png, v2/1.png
Due to some silly font rendering issues (Microsoft Word), I got some pages with output like below, but overall the it worked as expected.
Automator workflow for PDF to PNG
