PDF Compare - Randomized page order

[DillonTech]

I'm trying to compare two PDFs that will likely have differences, but there are certain differences we are aware of and want to ignore. Additionally, File A and File B will likely have pages that are similar except for those differences, but File A might have that information on Pg. 2 while File B has the information on Pg. 7.

Is there anyway for me to call out specific text formatting as 'not important' and also have Beyond Compare search through the entirety of the second file to find its match?

I think I'm really looking for the abilities I have when CSV comparing where I can mark columns as Key columns and other columns as not important.

[Aaron]

Hello,

You can generally define Unimportance in the Session Settings for an adhoc comparison, or define a grammar for File Formats, to set specific text as Unimportant when comparing two text (PDF) files.
http://www.scootersoftware.com/suppo..._unimportantv3

There is no method to find out of order content and mark it as unimportant. The alignment occurs first, and then the lines are compared left to right. A conversion can be used to sort the lines, which in a sorted order then align and are compared. We have an example of this (with RESX files) here:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/suppo...rnalconversion

However, PDF files would not follow a specific structure, and also need a conversion from PDF to Text for the Text Compare to load the content, so this conversion would probably be tricky to determine and implement.

If your PDF can be converted into a delimited or data-like format, you could open that in the Table Compare. The default PDF handling converts the PDF to plain text and opens in the Text Compare, but you could create another File Format that opens in the Table Compare instead (using the File Formats dialog, New Table Format). Before digging too far here, I would suggest using Adobe itself to Save As Text, and then check the text output for if it is properly formatted (delimiters, etc) for the Table Compare.