Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
1–10 of 85 posts
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#2We've been using this in the Micro:bit Educational Foundation (microbit.org) to fill a gap in hardware design tooling, and get visual diffs of our schematics and gerbers during PCB design iterations. It's kinda wild that's what we ended up doing, but if you want to be sure your radio layout didn't change at all when you're making a minor revision to a different part of the board, visual diffs are perfect.
That said, next project we want to try something more integrated with EDA tools. If anyone else has followed this path, we'd love to know.
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#3We use this tool in our team regularly for comparison of PDFs we obtain from third party services that might have changed after code-changes on our side. Big thanks to the author <3
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#4Interestingly, Github thinks the project is 46% shell, due to the fairly huge wxwin.m4.
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#5[flagged]
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#6No screenshots?
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#7No screenshots?
Here is one: https://vslavik.github.io/diff-pdf/
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#8Crazy, I'd have thought that modern multi-modal LLMs can do this, but when I tried Gemini, ChatGPT-4o and Claude they all pooped out:
- Gemini at first only diff'd the text, and then when pushed it identified the items in the images and then hallucinated the differences between the versions. It could not produce an image output.
- Claude only diff'd the text and refused to believe that there images in the PDFs.
- ChatGPT attempted to write and execute python code for this, which errored out.
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#9I have been using this in a CI pipeline to maintain a business-critical PDF generation (healthcare) app (started circa 2010 I think), here is the RSpec helpers I'm using:
https://gist.github.com/thbar/d1ce2afef68bf6089aeae8d9ddc05d...
The code contains git-stored reference PDFs, and the test suite re-generate them and assert that nothing has changed.
Helped a lot to audit visual changes, or PDF library upgrades!
Re: Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
#10Reminds me of the tool Bob Nystrom wrote to help himself out when working on the physical edition of Crafting Interpreters: https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-craft...
Whole article is worth reading, but if you want the relevant bits search for “ I wrote a Dart script that would take a PDF of the book”.