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I'm looking for a visual diff tool for Mac OS X that will allow me to see differences in Pages (from Apple's iWork suite) and Adobe Illustrator documents. I realize a visual diff may be a little much to ask, so I'd settle for some sort of XML or plain-text comparison. I'm using Pages to maintain my Spec and Illustrator for my mockups, which are all version-controlled, and would love to be able to easily see the differences.

FileMerge (which ships with Xcode) just barfs up gobbledygook, so binary comparisons definitely won't work. I know about Kaleidoscope, which does support diffs on various image formats (and seems to be an all-around good solution), but it doesn't seem that it supports Pages or Illustrator.

Dov
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  • This doesn't seem to be a programming topic to me, so I've voted to migrate to Super User. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Sep 07 '10 at 18:25
  • I posted here, because it's something that programmers might have an answer for, even though computer users at large might not. It's a question about a programming tool, which is posted here all the time. – Dov Sep 07 '10 at 23:08

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Araxis Merge has a lot of different file-format viewers. Straight up binary is one of them, if that will get the job done for you. It will do PDF and various other image formats as well.

Carl Norum
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  • While they support MS Office (http://www.araxis.com/merge_mac/topic_comparing_text_files.html) and some other non-plain-text formats, Pages is not one of them, and I didn't see evidence of Illustrator support in their image comparison. Unfortunately, binary comparison is not good enough, since I want to be able to actually see what changed, not just how much. – Dov Sep 07 '10 at 18:10
  • @Dov, I think you will find it difficult or impossible to find a diff tool that has built-in understanding of the Pages format. You might want to pick a text-based documentation format to make your life easier - LaTeX is a popular option. Good luck in your search! – Carl Norum Sep 07 '10 at 20:59
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I don't know about Illustrator files, but Pages has an XML portion. If you open the .pages file with unzip, there is an index.xml file containing all of the text and style information for the file, which you can then compare with diff or FileMerge.

allanberry
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  • Is there any way, using Changes, for example, to treat the file as a directory? I know when I compare ZIPs and JARs in Windows using Beyond Compare, it compares their contents like two directories. – Dov Nov 18 '11 at 16:47
  • I don't know about Changes, but since we're talking about the Mac, I might mention that BBEdit can read .zip files as if they are directories, and the Finder itself can look inside .app files (which are basically disguised .zip archives like .pages files). So, it's not an uncommon feature. – allanberry Jan 04 '12 at 17:25