useful tools
Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Mundane Mondays |
Mondays are my days for finding useful but mundane tools. Today's useful tool is xpdf. Why is it useful? I want to compare two pdf documents, and that is much easier to do when they are not pdf documents. Happily, xpdf has in its repertoire a script for converting pdf files to text. It is even klutz-compatible because (A) it works in Windows and (B) it only needs minimum command line attention. And there are instructions! If you feel like you are spending too much time on crummy manual tasks, this is one of those good tools to have handy.
Today I used xpdf for mysterious purposes that I am barred from disclosing. Tomorrow, I am going to use it to compare two insurance policies. Most "insurance people" are the non-technical types, so they read whole policies and hope to notice the differences between them. I am quite adept at this in fact, but I usually delegate to someone who is not yet up to speed on things like marketing, producing, or shouting at underwriters. So many insurance policies are available in texty pdf format these days that it seems silly not to compare two policies electronically. Most agencies use human labor for this purpose. Welcome to the information age!
If all you want to do is see the differences between your two text documents (as opposed to writing a script to update another file based on the differences between two files, which is my real ambition… but for another day), you might want to try something like WinMerge. One nice thing is that it is open-source, so if you are smarter than I am, you can probably use it to do exactly what you want. But if you need klutz-compatible software, you can use it as-is and see exactly what changed between two versions of a text file! Oh happy day!
Note: Texty pdf files are distinguished by the fact that they were converted to pdf from a format containing text, as opposed to images of text. There is probably a real word for this; unfortunately, I had to make up my own word, so please deal with it.
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