text-compare

[simplepete]

Does anyone know where to find freeware text-compare for two books in pdf format. I can only find line-by-line text compares and I need something that recognizes line breaks and text font while ignoring bolds,italics,etc. Surely there must be something out there for natural text docs??? I have literally searched for hours and would appreciate any feedback.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Sounds like you are expecting an awful lot for freeware!

I haven't tried them...but have you looked at these tools (not freeware)?

Ez PDF Compare
Diff Doc
Brava Viewer

[simplepete]

Thanks. I found something interesting in a shareware program called Compare Suite that does a word by word comparison rather than line by line. But still having problems with line breaks...I've read that some of these programs need to be 'aligned' but I haven't found out how to go about this???

[simplepete]

text-compare

Better yet, what I would really like to know is why a full line of spaces is not ignored, even when I have 'ignore all spaces' applied? Is there a word by word comparison program that will not treat full lines of spaces as a line of text? Whether it is pay, shareware, or freeware?

[Dave_L]

Are they really full lines of spaces, or do they contain other characters that appear to be spaces when displayed?

I use a utility pdftotext for searching .pdf files. It's part of the package xpdf: http://foolabs.com/xpdf/ It might be helpful to you, although it doesn't fit your exact requirements.

[simplepete]

Thanks, Dave. I have found a pretty good program that fulfills my requirements in Araxis Merge. It handles my directly download pdfs pretty well. If anyone can give me any more tips on text-compares for authors or librarians comparing two books while comparing word by word it would help me significantly. I need to find something for $100.00 USD or less or freeware or shareware. Thanks to Dave and Michael for your posts.