Open Notebook: compare two pdf files for IEEE PDF Express conference submission

Saturday, December 28, 2024

compare two pdf files for IEEE PDF Express conference submission

chatgpt: To compare two PDF files for differences, you have several options:

1. Using a PDF Comparison Tool

There are tools specifically designed for PDF comparison, such as:

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC: It has a built-in "Compare Files" feature.
DiffPDF: A lightweight application to compare two PDFs visually or textually.
Beyond Compare: A general comparison tool with PDF support via add-ons.
PDF-XChange Editor: Offers PDF comparison as part of its suite.

2. Online PDF Comparison Tools

There are free and paid online services for comparing PDFs:

Draftable: Offers a detailed side-by-side view of differences.
PDF24 Tools: A straightforward online PDF comparison tool.

3. Python for PDF Comparison

If you'd like to script the comparison, you can use Python libraries like PyPDF2, pdfplumber, or pdfdiff. Here's an example:

Example Python Code

from PyPDF2 import PdfReader

# Function to extract text from a PDF file
def extract_text_from_pdf(pdf_path):
    reader = PdfReader(pdf_path)
    text = ""
    for page in reader.pages:
        text += page.extract_text()
    return text

# Compare two PDFs
pdf1_text = extract_text_from_pdf("file1.pdf")
pdf2_text = extract_text_from_pdf("file2.pdf")

if pdf1_text == pdf2_text:
    print("The PDF files are identical.")
else:
    print("The PDF files have differences.")

4. Using Command-Line Tools

diffpdf: A command-line tool to compare PDFs.
pdftotext: Convert both PDFs to text and then use a standard text comparison tool like diff or vimdiff.

hqin@Hong-MBP2 Downloads % diff-pdf -v file1.pdf file2.pdf

page 0 has 3756 pixels that differ

page 0 differs

page 1 has 369491 pixels that differ

page 1 differs

page 2 has 0 pixels that differ

page 3 has 0 pixels that differ

page 4 has 0 pixels that differ

page 5 has 0 pixels that differ

page 6 has 0 pixels that differ

page 7 has 0 pixels that differ

page 8 has 0 pixels that differ

2 of 9 pages differ.

Visual comparison shows that IEEE PDF Express put an extract figure name in Figure 3. This png file name has extra space. So, I renamed this png file by replace white space with '_'s. This seems to fix the error.

hqin@Hong-MBP2 Downloads % diff-pdf -v overleaf-MABEL_neuralnetwork_SHAP_IEEE2024Fall.pdf /Users/hqin/Downloads/2024402761.pdf