How Do I Use the PDF Comparison Tool?

The PDF Comparison Tool was created to compare the PDF output from an older version of Designer or the Report Engines to the PDF output generated from a newer version. 

How it Works

You provide the program with the location of the old reports and the location of the new reports, and PDF files with the same name from each directory are compared based on the location and appearance of content. A file named "results.xml" will be created in the current directory, containing the PDF names and similarity percentages when the percentage is less than 99% (not less than 100% to account for things that should change like dates). 

In addition to results.xml, if a report has differences you have the option to merge the two compared PDF reports into a new one. The merged PDF report will have the same name as the old/new PDF reports, and be written to the current directory. This allows you to view the pages of each PDF side by side in Adobe Reader.

How to Execute the Tool

The tool is a Java jar file "PDFCompare.jar."

To run PDFCompare.jar, open a command prompt and navigate to the directory containing PDFCompare.jar, and run:

PROMPT> java -jar PDFCompare.jar [OLD FILE LOCATION] [NEW FILE LOCATION] [Y/N for merged PDF]

For example: "java -jar PDFCompare.jar C:\PDF\ C:\PDFnew\ Y"

Download PDFCompare.jar

You can download PDFCompare.jar from here.

Some Considerations When Using the Tool

  • Documents are going to be compared by filename. If the filename doesn't match in the old report and new report directories, the files won't be compared.
  • The program can be extremely slow when comparing large PDFs. 
  • Be sure to end the directories with a backslash.

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