In this article, you will learn how to create your PDF difference checker tool and compare two PDF files in Python.
Very often, you need to compare two versions of a PDF document and check the difference in the content. This could be required to identify the intentional or unintentional modifications in a document. Since it is not feasible to check the PDF files word by word, various online PDF comparison tools are available that let you find the difference between two PDF files. However, if you want to compare PDF files programmatically from within your Python application, this article helps you do it within a few easy steps.
Python Library to Compare PDF Files - Free Download
Aspose.Words for Python is a powerful yet easy-to-use library to create and process text documents including DOC, DOCX, and PDF. The library lets you compare the documents and track the changes even at the character level. We are going to use this library to compare PDF files in this article. To install the library from PyPI, you can use the following pip command.
> pip install aspose-words
Steps to Compare PDF Files in Python
Aspose.Words for Python provides a powerful PDF comparison mechanism and lets you find the differences with ease. The following are the steps to compare two PDF files using said Python library.
- Load both of the PDF files.
- Convert the PDF files to Word format.
- Compare both Word documents to get changes.
- Save the document containing the changes as a PDF to the desired location.
In the following section, you will see how to transform the above-mentioned steps into Python code and compare two PDF files.
Compare Two PDF Files in Python
The following are the steps to compare two PDF files and check the differences in Python.
- First, load both PDF files using Document class.
- Then, convert PDF files to Word DOCX format using Document.save() method.
- Create and set desired CompareOptions and compare documents using Document.compare() method.
- Finally, save the PDF file containing differences using Document.save() method.
The following code sample shows how to perform PDF comparison in Python.
The following screenshot shows the comparison of two PDF files.
Python PDF Comparison Library - Get a Free License
You can get a free temporary license to compare PDF files without evaluation limitations.
Conclusion
In this article, you have learned how to compare two PDF files in Python. Moreover, you have seen how to enable or disable different comparison options for PDF files dynamically. Thus, you can create your PDF difference checker application in Python quite easily.
Explore Aspose’ PDF Comparison Library for Python
You can explore the documentation of the library that we have used in this article to explore other useful features. In case of any questions, you can ask us via our forum.