The contractor's revision includes contour adjustments and a drainage change. I can't tell whether these are minor fie…
Open Adobe Acrobat Pro on your computer.
Go to the Tools pane and select Compare Files.
In the Compare Files window, click Select File on the left to choose the older version of your PDF.
Click Select File on the right to choose the newer version of your PDF.
Click Compare to start the comparison process.
Review the summary report that appears, which highlights all text and graphic differences between the two files.
Best practiceFor best results, avoid using scanned PDFs as input, since Acrobat compares text and graphics most accurately with digitally generated files.
Use the side-by-side view and navigation tools to examine each change in detail, including both textual edits and visual modifications.
Best practiceYou can focus the comparison on text, graphics, or both by adjusting the settings before running the comparison.
After comparing, use the navigation panel to quickly jump between each detected change in your PDFs.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
Comparing text only means Acrobat will ignore any pictures or graphics in your documents. This is useful when you only care about changes to the written words, for example, in a contract or a report. It helps you focus on text edits without being distracted by image differences.
This message appears because one or both of your PDF files have security settings. These settings stop Acrobat from making changes or even looking closely at the document's content, which is needed for comparison. To compare them, you must first remove the security protection from both files. This ensures Acrobat has full access to analyze the documents.
The 'Compare Files' tool works best with text that Acrobat can read. If your scanned document is just an image and does not have readable text, the comparison might not find all text changes. For scanned documents, it's often better if they have been 'OCR'd' (Optical Character Recognition) to convert images of text into actual text before comparing. Otherwise, Acrobat might only see image differences.
When comparing signed documents, Acrobat can specifically highlight changes made after a signature was applied. This is very important for legal or official documents. For unsigned documents, it just shows all differences between the two files. The special 'Compare signed document versions' feature helps you verify the integrity of a signed document, showing if anything was altered post-signature, which is a key difference from a general file comparison.