Screenshot of some text of a German contract in a terminal. One of the sections has basically the same text, but some dates changed. The dates from a.txt are displayed in red, the ones from b.txt in green.

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1. scy (scy@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 08-Aug-2023 21:09:51 UTC scy

   Okay, so. I have a #PDF and a #DOCX file. And I’d like to compare them. And since I’m a programmer, I don’t want to compare them visually, but with a #diff. But how?

   Like this.

   alias pdfcat='gs -q -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o-'
   alias doccat='pandoc -t plain'

   pdfcat a.pdf > a.txt
   doccat b.docx > b.txt

   git diff --no-index --word-diff a.txt b.txt

   And since we’re using --word-diff, it doesn’t matter that the two files use _wildly_ different line wrapping.

   #Unix #Linux #terminal #CLI