pdf to word

[sal_manila]

Since there is a plug in that converts pdf-to-text, is there anyway to compare a pdf to a word doc?

[chrroe]

Hi!

Have you tried to select both (the PDF and the DOC) in the windows explorer and then compare them via the context menu?
This should work ...


Bye
Christoph

[Chris]

BC2 doesn't have support for running more than one conversion type. Using the standard rules, it will look at the file extension of the first (left side) file, and run that converter on both files, even if the second file isn't of the same type. Our next major release will have this problem solved.

For version 2, I came up with a workaround. It calls a batch file as the external converter and the batch file looks at the file extension to determine what type of conversion to run. You can download it from:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/rules/PdfDoc2txt.zip

To install the rule, extract it to your BC2 program directory (default is c:\program files\beyond compare 2\). Open up BC's Folder Viewer. Select Tools|Import Settings, and import the PdfDoc2Txt.xml file.

This should allow you to compare a PDF file to a DOC file.

[sal_manila]

Closer, but still is not working correctly. I can now see both documents in the viewer but the pdf still has the formatting which is causing the selected documents to not match.
Thanks for the help - :)

[Chris]

The rules I posted just use the default options for Pdf2Text.exe.

If you try running Pdf2Text.exe from the command line with no arguments, it will give you a list of options. I don't know it well enough to know if using the command line options will help, but it might be worth a shot.

Otherwise your best bet is to use Acrobat to save the PDFs as plain text before comparing them in BC.