pdf compare bring up false positives

[maximojo]

Hi there,

I'm having some trouble comparing pds that contain column data. It seems BC gets confused and comapares the incorrect columns. When I look at a comparison with another tool (which is purpose build to compare pdfs) the comparison comes back with no issues.

Are there certain settings I should use when comparing pdf reports which contain column data i.e. data that is in a report form where there is row/column data similar to what you might see in Excel.

Thanks
m

ps - sorry I can't post up the reports as they contain customer info.

[maximojo]

Actually here is the compare (with customer info blurred) as well as one of the original files (with data also blurred).

Each row represents data for an individual customer, however BC gets confused by the columns for some reason. The reports are actually identical (checked this manually).

[Aaron]

Hello,

Thanks for posting. Our Text Compare uses a conversion process to create a temporary .txt file to compare. We then align line to line.

If you use our Align With command to manually align the data as you need, does the blurred black data still match (equal) or different? If that text is then different, that is likely the issue: the conversion is inserting line breaks in unexpected places and line-to-line we're aligning as similar as the algorithm points out. If that text is still equal, then the conversion is working well, but our alignment algorithm is having trouble with similar lines (which, in order to have a speedy comparison, will sometimes align over exact matches). If you try switching the Session menu -> Session Settings: Alignment tab, to one of the alternate algorithms, does this help?

[maximojo]

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for the reply.

If I use the Align With tool to e.g. align "467.22 +102.34" on the left side with it's value on the right, then the black data on the left does not match with the, now, empty space on the right. So the black data text on the left is now RED as it does not match the blank space on the right.

So I assume this means it your former example of the issue? There are some unexpected line-breaks?

Actually here's something better. I copied the text from BC into Notepad++ for the corresponding files. See attached image.

Also note, I played with all the alignment options to no avail.

[Aaron]

Hello,

That would seem to be the case. BC4 aligns line by line as best it can, so if there are more equal characters in the blurred section, that would push the alignment to align those line pairs. You can try a different conversion process to see if you can create files where lines contain the same information: does using Adobe itself, then File -> Save As, Text produce different line data?