For a new sales hire, I have offer paperwork from recruiting, tax forms from payroll, and training documents from L&D.…
Open Adobe Acrobat on your computer.
Go to Tools and select Compare Files.
Click Select File under 'Compare' and choose your first PDF (the older or original version).
Click Select File under 'With' and choose your second PDF (the newer or revised version).
Click Compare to start the comparison.
Review the results in the comparison summary and use the side-by-side view to examine highlighted differences.
Best practiceFor best results, avoid using scanned PDFs as input files, as text recognition may be inconsistent.
You can filter the comparison results to focus on text, images, or formatting changes for a clearer review.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
Comparing two PDF documents helps you quickly identify all the differences between them. This is useful for checking revisions, ensuring no unwanted changes were made, or understanding what parts of a document have been updated over time. It saves you from manually reading through every page.
Acrobat's 'Compare Files' feature works best with text-based PDFs. If your onboarding packet is a scanned image, you might need to use 'Compare text only' mode, but it might not find all changes if the text is not recognized. For best results, ensure your scanned documents have gone through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so Acrobat can 'read' the text.
This message means one or both of your PDF files have security settings that stop Acrobat from making changes or comparisons. To fix this, you need to remove the security protection from the documents first. You usually do this by going to 'Protect' in Acrobat and removing any passwords or restrictions.