Any good applications around for visually comparing PDF docs?

In My Humble Opinion
1

One time-consuming task for me is checking circuit diagrams for compatibility with systems. Often I get circuit diagrams for, say, five plants with identical specifications, for the same end customer, only TBTB at our customer have decreed that there must be a separate circuit diagram for every plant.

So I get five separate diagrams (that I generate PDFs of for internal purposes). Mostly the diagram file sets are copies, with only reference numer and plant names changed.

Ideally I’d check only one of them as they ought to be identical - only, I don’t get a definitive statement that they are in fact identical (instead I get an e-mail “Please find attached plans for plant A, plant B, Plant C, …”), and sometimes something goes wrong in generation and they are not in fact identical.

So, I need to check, say, five stacks of printout for technical identity of the circuitry, page by page. (there is no tool for comparing files for the CAD system).

The sort of application that I’d think would be a great help to me in this situation would do something like the following:

  • have the user select n PDF files
  • then, quickly cycle through displaying a particular page for each of these files. Any difference would stand out like a sore thumb (as the human brain is well suited to notice changes, discard the unchanging)
  • on “page up”/“page down”, change page on every one of the documents.

Is there something on these lines on the market?

2

hmm…would something like this work?

That program might be assuming the PDFs all came from the same source file. But…yours probably did, right?

3

Thanks for the pointer - I installed a trial version of the DocuComp Acrobat plugin and it works fine for comparing circuit diagrams that have been generated by copying and changing a few variables. Even found a copying error that I’d probably not have noticed. The case for purchase should be easy.

Again, thanks.