Need to Compare PDFs?

Are you responsible for those last minute changes being correctly made in the final PDF? Is your reputation (or even your job) at stake if they weren’t?

 

If so, PDF Comparator is for you!

For $125 (USD) or less per seat, PDF Comparator is an elegant PDF comparison software application that can help you quickly and accurately make SURE that everything is as it should be before you let that PDF go, eliminating all kinds of potential problems.

While there is no shortage of applications that compare text and image content in PDFs, PDF Comparator harnesses Mac OS X’s built in ability to render PDFs to compare two PDFs, one to the other, pixel-by-pixel as they will print.

Adobe^® Acrobat^® does have “Compare PDFs” function, but it can be slow and less than completely accurate. Its results can also be both confusing and time consuming to interpret. PDF Comparator, on the other hand, quickly and easily gives you accurate results that are a breeze to interpret.

PDF Comparator lets you quickly and conveniently compare, let’s say, version 42 of your document to version 41. Do this just before you deliver it to your client or printer, and relax!

Clicking the link at left or below will download the current release version of PDF Comparator. Without a valid license key, it will operate in “demo” mode in which half of each displayed PDF page will be obscured by a solid triangular area. If you’d to try out PDF Comparator wihtout this demo restriction, please contact us to receive a temporary license key.

Click here to download PDF Comparator

Click here to watch a brief overview movie.

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Frequently Asked Questions (and answers)

Why do I need PDF Comparator if I already have Acrobat?

While it is true that Acrobat Professional software has a “Compare Documents” feature, we feel that PDF Comparator is superior in several ways:

• PDF Comparator displays differences in a way that is much easier to understand and manage. Because Acrobat creates an individual note object for each difference it finds, making sense of the findings can be a daunting task, especially on pages which contain many differences.
• PDF Comparator gives the user more control of the comparison parameters than Acrobat does.
• PDF Comparator detects some differences that Acrobat misses.
• PDF Comparator is significantly faster in our testing.

Why is PDF Comparator only available for Mac OS X?

We've designed PDF Comparator to use Mac OS X’s built-in capability to render PDFs. Since no other OS has this built-in capability, we have so far only created a Mac OS X version of PDF Comparator. There are other implementation options, such as using third-party RIPs or using a “helper app” such as Adobe Photoshop^®. While these alternatives may carry with them either cost or performance penalties, we will consider them for future development if there is enough interest for versions on other operating systems.

What are the known issues or limitations of PDF Comparator?

As with all software, PDF Comparator has a few known issues and limitations you need to be aware of. Because it relies on the operating system to render the PDFs being compared, it is subject to the same limitations as other apps that do the same. In general, PDF Comparator will “see” your PDFs exactly as the Finder, Mail.app, or Preview.app would. This means that certain things may be problematic:

• Certain transparency effects may not be rendered correctly.
• Overprint attributes will not be honored.
• PDF Comparator cannot detect the differences between color spaces (e.g., 0R-0G-0B will not be distinguished from 0C-0M-0Y-100K).

 

Adobe, Acrobat, and Adobe Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.