PDF Text Diff

This is a Python application that compares two PDF files and finds differences in the text. The application was developed using Python 3.11.

Prerequisites

Windows

1. Tesseract OCR (OCR = optical character recognition)

   • Download and install Tesseract

   • Set environment variable
     After installation, you need to set the environment variable of the Tesseract ( e.g. C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR)

   • Verify Tesseract installation
     Open the Windows Command Prompt and run the next command:

     tesseract --version
     

     You should get a result in form:

     tesseract v5.3.1.20230401
     ...
     

   • Replace <tesseract_exe_path> with path to executable tesseract.exe

     pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = (
       r"<tesseract_exe_path>"  # e.g. r"C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe"
     )

2. Poppler

   • Download the latest binary from here

   • Unzip the folder wherever you want and add the path to the environmental variables ( e.g. C:\Software\poppler-0.68.0\bin)

   • Change the value of variable POPPLER_PATH in file constants/constants.py

       # Windows also needs poppler_exe
       POPPLER_PATH = Path(r"<poppler_path>")  # e.g. C:\Software\poppler-0.68.0\bin

Linux

1. Tesseract OCR

   To install Tesseract OCR on Linux, run the following commands:

   git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.git
   cd tesseract
   sudo ./autogen.sh
   sudo ./configure
   sudo make
   sudo make install
   sudo ldconfig
   sudo make training
   sudo make training-install
   

Installation

1. Clone the repository
2. Install the required packages: pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

1. Add two PDF files to the input folder: template.pdf and template_changed.pdf
2. Run the main.py script: python main.py
3. The script will compare the two PDF files and output the differences in the text.

Project structure

The project has the following file structure:

• constants/: a package containing constants used throughout the application.
• functions/: a package containing all the functions used in the application.
• input/: a folder containing the input PDF files.
• main.py: the main script that runs the application.
• requirements.txt: a file containing the required Python packages to run the application.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you find a bug or have a feature request, please open an issue on the repository.

Running Docker Compose

Starting up Docker Compose is easy. To begin, ensure you're in the pdf-text-diff folder and run the following from the Command Prompt:

docker compose up -d

To bring down the environment and remove the volume — which we defined within compose.yaml — run the following command:

docker compose down -v

Remove all unused containers, networks, images, and volumes

docker system prune -af

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.