Text comparison utility

5

I know this has been asked before, but I have a spin as I have been trying out varying free software offerings. I want to rid out department of DiffDoc. The problem is that I am having trouble locating something that will do what we need. WinMerge has been the latest attempt.

The problem is simple. One Word and one PDF document with a portion of it containing the text to be compared against.

Compare them and be done. Raw text, ignore whitespace, ignore carriage returns, etc.; and give me the results in some sort of report.

We tried ExamDiff, kdiff3, Tortoise, and a few others.

Aaron McIver

Posted 2010-06-03T18:35:47.770

Reputation: 1 405

possible duplicate of What is a good text comparison tool for Windows?

– Sathyajith Bhat – 2010-06-03T18:46:24.883

6This question is more specific and addresses a common problem with few, if any, commonly available solutions: compare the text content of docs in two different, non-plain-text, formats. – JRobert – 2010-06-03T18:56:29.923

@JRobert is hitting the nail on the head...it seems so simple yet nothing seems to tackle it... – Aaron McIver – 2010-06-03T19:21:57.690

It only seems simple, which is why no one has tackled it. Probably the best solution is to convert to plain text from the native applications. Not even the FSM knows what text is actually in a Word .doc – msw – 2010-06-03T23:20:34.593

1Perhaps you should emphasize this in your question @Aaron ;-) – Ivo Flipse – 2010-06-04T09:42:31.403

DiffDoc performs the task...it is not a free tool though. Someone out there has had to have run into this issue and come up with a solution. I really am not wanting to attempt to hodge podge tools together and develop something for this simple task. – Aaron McIver – 2010-06-07T14:49:29.187

Answers

0

As of current my solution is a hodge-podged app. PDFBox for PDF extraction and Word Interop for Word docs. It rips through them replaces \r\n with " ", pushes each to a .txt file then they are ready to be compared in a simple manner in WinMerge.

Would really like something a bit more robust and official...but as of now...this is the answer for free...

Aaron McIver

Posted 2010-06-03T18:35:47.770

Reputation: 1 405

0

You could try looking into awk, sed and some bash scripting to help you out.

tapan

Posted 2010-06-03T18:35:47.770

Reputation: 918

1I have a feeling that a lobotomy performed with a 0.44" calibre firearm would be both quicker and less painful. – Jonathan Leffler – 2010-06-08T05:46:33.680

lol ... totally agree with you Jonathan :) – tapan – 2010-06-09T03:58:34.987

Asked: 2010-06-03T18:35:47.770

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Active: 2014-07-29T17:32:49.437