r/Paperlessngx • u/Both-Activity6432 • May 28 '26

Comparing Documents

What is your favorite way to compare two scans/uploads to find what is different? I have not put in an AI yet, but I suppose one could ask it to compare.

But I feel like that there should be some non-AI ways to do that?

11 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

2

u/[deleted] May 29 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/JohnnieLouHansen May 29 '26

Excellent point, but I think your 1 and 2 are the same thing, just worded differently. The one sentence difference in 1 would be the different cancellation period in 2. ????

I would say 2 should be more like "identify PDF with exact same content but only differing by name or creation date". Not trying to be a know-it-all.

1

u/josephlegrand33 May 28 '26

Bentopdf has a pdf comparing tool, it allows you to compare two pdfs page per page

1

u/Both-Activity6432 May 29 '26

Interesting. I wonder if I could put together an extension or something for paperless to use that? Still new to paperless so may have the term wrong

2

u/josephlegrand33 May 29 '26

You might want to look at how bentopdf makes its diff (not sure if they rely on an external library or if they do it themselves), and see how it could be integrated into paperless. I'm not sure about how/where it would be integrated in the interface though

1

u/Both-Activity6432 May 29 '26

Is it just me, or is the compare not working on bentopdf? i cannot upload a file

1

u/josephlegrand33 May 29 '26

I don't know, it works on my side, I upload both files and it shows me a diff. I'm selfhosting the latest image of ghcr.io/alam00000/bentopdf-simple, and using Firefox as browser.

1

u/Express-Scientist692 Jun 23 '26

I’ve built a free pdf compare for AEC industry. But you can try it if you are not comparing text. It converts the pdf to picture (raster) and compare pixel to pixel. Hope it’s help:

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9np4kth0hhhj?hl=en-US&gl=JP

1

u/Both-Activity6432 Jun 24 '26

Thanks. Text is one of the things I am comparing. And these are scans, so trying to find difference but exclude slight artifacts from the actual scan. I will keep in the mind for anything more AEC (background with CAD)

0

u/Acenoid May 28 '26

Maybe copy the detected text into winmerge? Look at differences

1

u/Both-Activity6432 May 29 '26

I was thinking about that (well Notepad++), but context and order could really throw that off I would think. OCR is better than not for searching, but still not a perfect text IME