Compare PDF Files

@david_tuma

Thank you for your suggestion to use a screenshot of one of the comparison panes.

Unfortunately, a screenshot is not good enough for two reasons:

  1. A screenshot is an image and I’d lose the ability to select/copy/paste the text. (No, I don’t have an Apple Silicon, e.g., M1, Mac so Monterey’s Live Text feature is not an option. I suppose that I could take a picture of the screen with my iPhone and convert the image to text there, but what a pain.)

  2. The text comparison is very long and it just isn’t practical to take this many screenshots.

What I’m really after is a “redlined” version of the PDF, much like Word provides for comparing .docx files.

I flirted with converting my PDFs into Word files and using Word to do the comparison. Unfortunately, my version of Word for Mac is very old—version 16—and does not support opening PDFs. Apparently the current version of Word for Mac (2021) does support opening PDFs.

At this point, my need for PDF comparison software has lapsed. The tax return revision review was completed the old-fashioned way, with printouts and eyeballs. Oh, how 20th century!

Nevertheless, I think there may be an unmet need for PDF comparison software (unless Word does a really good job of importing and comparing them).

Thank you again for your suggestion.

UPDATE 2022-02-17
I upgraded to Microsoft Office Home & Business for Mac 2021 with a perpetual license. Unfortunately, I’m not able to convert a PDF to an editable document using Word 2021 for Mac. See this post for details on my travails.

Apparently, Word (365, 2021, 2019, 2016, and 2013) for Windows can convert a PDF to an editable document locally, but I suspect that the only way Word 2021 for Mac can do so is to enable “Connected Experiences” so that it can be uploaded and converted on a Microsoft (?) server, just as was the case with Word 2016 for Mac.

I’m hesitant to upload a PDF with sensitive information to any server, even Microsoft’s. But at this point, I can’t even get a server-based conversion to work.