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PDiff Express Comparing texts has never been this easy.

PDF comparison PDiff Express

Compare two PDF documents - fast, incredibly easy and reliably. Just drop two PDF icons into the PDiff window… and instantly see the comparison results. Comparing texts has never been this easy.

What exactly has changed, what is really the same? How often do you get back a document and are still uncertain about the changes? Why is it such a hard task to juggle with revisions edited by many authors? If you just want to see what happened, then PDiff Express is made for you.

PDiff Express allows you to compare the content of two PDFs in order to pinpoint all textual changes. Just drag and drop two versions into PDiff and you will see all differences at a glance. This still works if fonts, layout, hyphenation or even page breaks were altered.

PDiff Express is an ideal solution to compare versions of your

  • important office documents
  • mission critical technical manuals
  • legal texts and business contracts
  • financial reports
  • manuscripts and thesis texts
  • scientific articles, reports, and proceedings
  • fictional books and non-fiction books
  • copywriting to ready-to-print layout

Comparing PDFs with PDiff Express

Key Features

  • fast and reliable PDF text comparison for multipage documents
  • highlighting of differences (changes, insertions, and deletions) in the PDF files
  • text synopsis display with synchronized text and highlighted differences
  • synchronized side-by-side display of two PDFs: see corresponding words in all displays by hovering with the mouse over the text
  • comparison handles layout changes (e.g. single vs. multi column), font, size and style changes, added hyphenation and different page breaks
  • spot light display to distinguish text from non-text areas
  • reformatting of text according to layout of the other document
  • full text search function
  • easy-to-use interface for best user experience
  • full Unicode support for international scripts

Interface Languages

English, German

Available on Mac App Store

PDiff Express for Mac is available on the Mac App Store.

Mac App Store: PDiff Express 2

Need more features?

Do you need more features such as other input formats (RTF, DOC/DOCX, HTML), automation or printed proof reports? Then have a look at our PDiff Desktop, PDiff QA, and PDiff Professional at https://www.csci.de/en/pdiff.

Version History

Version 2.2.4:

  • FREEMIUM LICENCE MODEL WITH IN-APP PURCHASE
    • free version compares PDF files with up to 3 pages (max. 1000 words)
    • in-app purchase for unlimited PDF input (free upgrade for PDiff Express 1.x users)
    • in-app purchase for comparison reports as annotated PDFs
  • thumbnail widget of all differences for quick overview and navigation
  • menu item Windows > Differences for a navigable list of differences including differences per character
  • menu item Windows > Separate Windows supports splitting into separate windows to work in dual monitor environments
  • retina display support

Version 1.7.0:

  • New toolbar
  • New menu item View > Show special characters
  • New menu item View > Show text flow
  • Added a statistic widget to the window status bar
  • Fixed a crash in conjunction with some accessibility features of OS X 10.8 and OS X 10.9 turned on (System Preferences > Accessibility)
  • Compatibility with OS X 10.10

Version 1.6.2:

  • Improved performance for long documents
  • Fix for PDFs with problematic characters (empty quads)

Version 1.6.1:

  • Compatibility with OS X 10.9.1
  • Minor changes and improvements

Version 1.6:

  • Compatibility with OS X 10.9
  • Exclusion rects (e.g. for page headers and footers): In the PDF preview pane, click and hold at the first corner then drag to the second corner. Right click an exclusion rect for more options
  • Page ranges (right click on the PDF preview pane)
  • Additional settings, esp. adjustable colors
  • Append documents (File menu) allows to compare texts distributed over multiple files

Version 1.5:

  • New parameter to prevent undesired synchronization of differences at frequent short word sequences (e.g. “and”, “by the”, …)
  • Added an alert for PDFs without extractable text
  • New menu items File > Open Document A/B to open files with a file chooser dialog in addition to existing drag ‘n drop mechanism

Version 1.4:

  • Fixed a memory leak

Version 1.3:

  • Speed-up by factor 3 or more (depending on number of CPU cores)

Version 1.2:

  • Fix for media box origin different from (0,0)

Version 1.1:

  • Improved display of differences only (switch under the text synopsis display). Hover over a diff in the lower window pane to jump directly to its position in the PDF.
  • Additional GUI elements

Version 1.0:

  • Initial release