cascremers / pdfdiff Goto Github PK

pdfdiff version: 0.93
OS version: 21.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 21.4.0: Mon Feb 21 20:34:37 PST 2022; root:xnu-8020.101.4~2/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

Problem description:
If no diff tools before vimdiff are available and vimdiff is installed (and used for diff), the program runs infinitely during the comparison of any 2 pdf files.

Expected behavior:
The program outputs the diff or shows the graphical interface for comparison.

Actual behavior:
The program waits indefinitely.

Additional information:
vimdiff is the only interactive console-level interface here and by default, if you open the text files with vimdiff it opens the interface and waits for your command to close the diff. I suggest that infinite wait time is just because vimdiff waits for the commands and do not return output to the python program. The simplest solution is just to drop vimdiff probably.

If I run pdfdiff, I got the following error:

File "./pdfdiff.py", line 144
print "Error: %s" % (notfound)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

• kdiff3 is installed,
• xpdf is installed
• phyton is installed

uname -i : 4.9.61-3-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Nov 9 01:18:52 UTC 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Hi cas,
I just found this tool while reviewing a student's paper.
I tested on my mac on python3 (v3.9.1) but I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/src/pdfdiff/pdfdiff.py", line 494, in
if len(filter(lambda s:s.startswith(diffViewerPrefix),get_viewer_list())) == 0:
TypeError: object of type 'filter' has no len()

The issue seems to be that filter returns something different than what it used to be. I will keep hunting for a fix, but if you have one I'd appreciate it, as I am not a python expert ;).

BTW: I just looked at your webpage and I might contact you for work at some point ;)

I've customised slightly as I want diff to be run as:
diff --unified=0 --report-identical-files

It seems these extra parameters aren't acted on (and I don't understand lamda..). I also tried kdiff3 selection and it seems also that it's parameters:
kdiff3 --cs WordWrap=1 --cs ShowWhiteSpaceCharacters=0
may not be getting passed when view_diff runs:

• print "[%s]" % prg
  cmd = "%s "%s" "%s"" % (prg,fleft.name,fright.name)
  out = commands.getoutput(cmd)

Currently, pdfdiff.py handles ligatures by considering a hard-coded set of ligature encodings. This set is incomplete and depends on the encoding of the input.

Ideally, we detect the encoding of text input files (this is hard, but one can consider, e.g. using the chardet libs) and then use python's codecs module to normalize the input, in particular for ligatures.