Manufacturing

PDF comparison for manufacturing

A supplier sends a revised specification. Which of the forty pages actually changed? Compare the two PDFs and get the answer as a change list and a redline, not a page-by-page reading exercise.

What manufacturing teams compare

Engineering specifications, work instructions, manuals, supplier documents.

What you get

How the comparison works

Text is extracted from both PDFs with its position and style. Repeating headers, footers and page numbers are removed, unchanged tables are recognised and held out, and paragraphs are aligned across the two documents before a character-level comparison. The output is a change list with page numbers, a redlined PDF and a side-by-side view with synced scrolling. The engine is deterministic: the same two documents always produce the same result.

Deployment options

Use the web tool for individual reviews, the REST API to trigger comparisons from your document system, or a private deployment in your own VPC or on-premises when documents cannot leave your network.

Questions from manufacturing teams

Does it handle multi-column layouts?

Yes. Two-column pages are read in reading order, so a column layout does not produce false differences.

Can we automate this from our PLM?

Yes. The REST API accepts two PDFs and returns the change list as JSON, so a PLM or DMS workflow can trigger comparisons on release.

Further reading

Related industries

Run it on your own documents

Bring two real revisions to a 20-minute call and watch the comparison run.

Book a demoAPI documentation