You have the original copy of your Word 2010 document — the stuff you wrote. You also have the copy that Barbara, your editor, has worked on for a week or so. Both Word documents have different names, of course. Your job is to compare them to see exactly what’s been changed from the original. You actually don’t open the original document to start, believe it or not.
Here’s how to compare Word documents in macOS! First, open the Word from your Dock or from the Applications folder on your Mac. A shortcut to Applications lives under Finder ’s “Go” menu.
1Click the Review tab and, from the Compare group, choose Compare→Compare.
The Compare Documents dialog box shows up.
2Select the original document from the Original Document drop-down list.
Mac tech 1000 tool box. If you can’t find the original document, click the wee folder icon to browse for it.
3Select the edited document from the Revised Document drop-down list.
Like with the original document, you can locate the revised one by clicking the folder icon to browse.
4Click OK.
File Comparison Tool For Mac
Word compares the two documents and notes all changes. Then it displays a list of changes, the compared document with changes marked, plus the original and revised documents.
5If your screen doesn't display all the information it should, click the Compare button again and, from its menu, choose Show Source Documents→Show Both.
Look it over! Peruse the changes made to your pristine prose by the barbarian interlopers; use the Reviewing pane to witness each change individually.
6Click a change in the Reviewing pane if you want to see which part of your document was folded, spindled, or mutilated.
Each reviewer is given his or her own color on your screen. For example, the writer’s revision marks may appear in red, but had a second person reviewed the text, those comments would appear in a second color, and so on for other reviewers.
Did this glimpse into formatting Word documents leave you longing for more information and insight about Microsoft’s popular word processing program? You’re free to test drive any of the For Dummies eLearning courses. Pick your course (you may be interested in more from Word 2013), fill out a quick registration, and then give eLearning a spin with the Try It! button. You’ll be right on course for more trusted know how: The full version’s also available at Word 2013.
I am looking for an application to compare two PDF files.
Application must:
File Comparison Tool For Mac
- be able to highlight differences between the two documents
- be mac-compatible as I will be using it on a mac
- be free, I do not want to spend any money
I will be mostly using this for comparing the new versions of the apple developer license agreements (since I am an apple developer who is too lazy to read a 40+ page document every time a minor change is made)
The application does not need to be from the App Store, nor does it need to need to be official (some knockoff from GitHub will be fine as long as it does not contain any viruses or bundled crapware) all I need is for it to do what it is intended to do (compare PDF's) very well.
If you would like to go above and beyond, free to take on the challenge of developing the application yourself (or modifying an existing one).
I won't use this application very often and will accept it in any of the following formats:
- Mac app store app
- Java app
- Web app
- AppleScript file (I will need to see the source code)
- Automator workflow
- basically anything that will run on Mac OS X Yosemite (non-beta) and perform the intended task effectively
5 Answers
You can use DiffNow:
- it's free
- web-app diff tool
- works via pasting text; uploading files; using URLs
The only limitation is that files must be < 2048kb.
The sample on their site (first pdf vs. Google migration tool for outlook for mac. second pdf):
File Comparison Tool
Tomcompare (command from ImageMagick)
If you want to compare the visual appearance of page 4 of a.pdf with page 6 of b.pdf, you can use ImageMagick's command line tool compare. Here is a variation of commands to try:
(ImageMagick's frame/page counting is zero-based; so '[3]' means 'page 4'..) This will create 'delta' documents, where each pixel that is different between the pages is painted in red:
- The first variant keeps a pale version of
a.pdfas a background image to the page. - The second variant uses a resolution of
300 PPI(instead of the default72 PPI). - The third variant creates a white+red delta only (leaving away the pale background).
- The fourth variant does mark as red only those pixels which have a color difference of more than 5%.
It should be noted, that the comparison only works if the respective page sizes for the compared files are exactly identical.
diffpdf (GUI application)
DiffPDF is a GUI application which can process 2 or 3 PDF input and show the differences:
- There is a mode that compares text content only, highlighting word and character differences.
- There is another mode that compares visual differences and highlights them.
The home page only offers a paying Windows version now, but earlier versions were free. You can grab the source code e.g. from Debian, it includes compilation instructions for OS X.
unorDocument Comparison Software
DiffPDF nowadays is an paid software for Windows only, but it was previously free and also available for OS X. You can still download such a previous version.
It allows both visual and textual comparison.
When comparing PDF files, you have the choice between:
- comparing the contents (i.e. the actual text)
- comparing the pages as a whole (visual comparison).
While you might be looking for the first type of comparison, I wanted to offer a way to compare two PDF files page-by-page.
As I've had this requirement regularly in the past, and couldn't find the necessary software to perform the comparison, I wrote my own and made it available on GitHub. It's called pyPdfCompare and is available free of charge.
It runs fine on OS X and Windows but does require you to install Python 3, Ghostscript and ImageMagick. Furthermore, you'll need to perform a pip install for the libraries it uses.
It may be a little too technical and/or not exactly what you were looking for, but I wanted to offer the option anyway, for the sake of completeness.
TomFor your use case, comparing the text and discarding all formatting and non-text elements would work well. You can run the pdftotext utility on each file and then a text comparison tool on the result. On OS X, you can install pdftotext from various free software distribution channels such as Brew or MacPorts, it's part of the poppler package.
Cas Cremers's pdfdiff.py script automates the running of pdftotext (which needs to be installed separately) and of a diff viewer (ditto).
The result is similar to DiffNow cited by ᔕᖺᘎᕊ, I think they use pdftotext internally and plug the output into a text diff webapp.