On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 4:13 PM, luigi scarso wrote:

Maybe stupid Consider this (you must have cow.pdf in the same dir):

%%test-1.tex \setupcolors[state=start] \setupinteraction[state=start] \starttext \startfrontmatter \completecontent \stopfrontmatter \startbodymatter \chapter{Chapter} \section{Section} \input tufte \externalfigure[cow] \chapter{Chapter 2} \section{Section} \input knuth \stopbodymatter \stoptext

with markii $>texexec --pdf test-1.tex $>cp test-1.pdf test-1a.pdf $>texexec --pdf test-1.tex $>pdftoppm test-1a.pdf  test-1a- $>pdftoppm test-1.pdf  test-1- $> cmp test-1a.pdf test-1.pdf test-1a.pdf test-1.pdf differ: byte 35086, line 220 of course at least /ID is different

$>for j in `seq 1 4`; do cmp test-1a--$j.ppm test-1--$j.ppm ; done and, again of course, *no differences* because the files are equals page-by-page -- so they are equals

Is there a way more quick and clean than  for cycle and ppm files? Any idea ?

-- luigi

Is there a way more quick and clean than for cycle and ppm files?

The following shell script is not quick or clean, but it is thorough and I use it to find changes from one version of a pdf file to the next. For example, for my textbook page proofs, after I fix a bad line break, I compare the new and most recent previous versions to check that the fix has not created subsequent bad page breaks. The script runs on GNU/Linux and requires pdftoppm (from xpdf or poppler) and imagemagick (for the 'compare' utility). It generates the comparison bitmaps in a /tmp directory. The output looks like: /tmp/tmp.IWHtn0z7hk/diff-1.ppm 4250.32 (0.0648558) /tmp/tmp.IWHtn0z7hk/diff-2.ppm 3429.2 (0.0523262) /tmp/tmp.IWHtn0z7hk/diff-3.ppm 2890.33 (0.0441036) /tmp/tmp.IWHtn0z7hk/diff-4.ppm 1455.9 (0.0222157) where column 1 is the filename, which tells you which page is being compared, column 2 is a measure of the difference between the two files on that page, and column 2 is a normalized measure of column 2. To view the pages in order of most to least changed: compare-pdfs a.pdf b.pdf | sort -nr -k2 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs feh -FV I put this command in the Makefile for a project. -Sanjoy #! /bin/bash # Usage: $0 file1.pdf file2.pdf # compares file1.pdf and file2.pdf by converting each page to bitmaps using # pdftoppm and then using the 'compare' ImageMagick utility # # Copyright 2007-2009 Sanjoy Mahajan. Licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 # or (at your option) any later version. # # HISTORY # 2009-09-30: Fix capture of dB output; don't use a viewer; use pdftoppm # 2007-01-15: First version # dpi=144 if [ -z "$1" -o -z "$2" ]; then echo "Usage: $0 file1.pdf file2.pdf" exit 3 fi # generate the many page images in a temporary directory d=`mktemp -d` pdftoppm -r $dpi $1 $d/one & pdftoppm -r $dpi $2 $d/two & wait # find the union of the page numbers (in case one pdf has more pages) pages=`ls $d/{one,two}-*.ppm | sed "s/.*-\([0-9][0-9]*\).ppm/\1/" | sort -un` # compare each page for p in $pages ; do if ! [ -e "$d/one-$p.ppm" ] ; then echo "$p: missing from $1" continue fi if ! [ -e "$d/two-$p.ppm" ] ; then echo "$p: missing from $2" continue fi echo -n "$d/diff-$p.ppm " compare -metric mae $d/{one,two}-$p.ppm $d/diff-$p.ppm 2>&1 done