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Acrobat Pro has a pretty robust "Compare Files" tool that allows comparing files (in particular, PDFs) visually, side-by-side, almost like the diff tools found in a bunch of IDEs for code.

Anyway, I have this old Windows Forms app that generates PDF-formatted reports. My would like our app to be able to do the same kind of visual comparison, but since they all already have Acrobat licenses, it seems silly/time-consuming to reinvent that wheel.

However, I would still like to improve their QOL a little by allowing them to select the report versions they want to compare from within our app, then hit a button (or some such) that will open Acrobat and toss the selected files straight into the compare tool.

Is this possible?

I looked all around the Acrobat SDK documentation and didn't find anything, but it also looked like those docs were written in 2015... this latest compare tool seems newer than that, so I figured maybe there's a way that's just not well-documented yet?

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Derek Rutter
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  • A similar question has aleady been asked! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11004524/how-to-compare-two-pdf-files-through-command-line – phuzi Mar 02 '20 at 13:08

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You cannot access the Compare tool via the Acrobat API. The Compare tool was developed as a plug-in to Acrobat and does not expose its interface.

joelgeraci
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  • Well, that's not what I was hoping to hear, but it does answer the question - so thanks! – Derek Rutter Mar 02 '20 at 16:48
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    If you don't need to do the comparison on the client, you can render the PDF to an image and then use the Google vision API to detect differences in the images. If you render to 72 DPI, it's fairly simple to map the Vision response rectangles to PDF coordinates to create a visual representation of the differences. – joelgeraci Mar 02 '20 at 17:32