pdfcompare2docker

Use the pdfcompare tool, despite it not having been updated past Python 2 WITH THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!

Installing

1. Install Docker and docker-compose on your distribution.

   • OpenSUSE/SLES: sudo zypper install docker python3-docker-compose

2. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/openSUSE/pdfcompare2docker

First-Run Prerequisites

On the first run, Docker needs to download a container with an installation of pdfcompare on openSUSE Leap 15.1.

This means, you need:

• Make sure you have at least 400 MB of space on your root partition left
• Make sure you have internet access
• Either have the root password of your machine at the ready or add your user account to the docker group (after adding your user account to the group you need to log out and back in again before the group change is applied)
• The docker service must be running: sudo systemctl start docker

Creating Output Documents

1. In a terminal, go to the cloned directory.
2. Copy both PDFs to the cloned directory: cp /path/to/PDF1.pdf /path/to/PDF2.pdf . Make sure none of the files you want to compare is called output.pdf.
3. Run docker-compose:
   • If your user account is a member of the docker group: docker-compose run pdfcompare PDF1.pdf PDF2.pdf
   • If your user account is not a member of the docker group: sudo docker-compose run pdfcompare PDF1.pdf PDF2.pdf

(Other options of the script are explained by the tool itself, using docker-compose run pdfcompare --help.)

NOTE: If one of the PDFs you want to diff has an appended .old or a date like -20220209 (for example, MyBook.pdf-20220209), pdfcompare marks all content as changed. Make sure all PDFs have the file extension .pdf.

References

• For the container image itself, see Docker Hub.
• For the container definition, see the doc-ci repository.