the timestampz in a pdf, oh my

[der.hans]

Am 01. Feb, 2017 schwätzte Joseph Sinclair so:

moin moin,

> Have you checked DiffPDF?
> It's supposed to do what you're looking for, although it's no-longer actively maintained (author took it closed-source :( ).

Not familiar with it. Ah, comparepdf for the command line version.

comparepdf -ca web1.pdf web2.pdf

Will have to test with it to verify some basic tolerances.

> Another alternative might be to use pdf2ps (part of ghostscript) to
> transform into postscript and compare that, but you may need to do
> more massaging as timestamps and such would probably still be in the
> postscript.

I tried that. I expected the datestamps to carry over, but they appear to
not have. The files are still different, though :(.

I was thinking pdf2png or pdf2jpg type of thing might work. Have to check
if I always get the same output.

ciao,

der.hans

> On 02/01/2017 01:29 AM, der.hans wrote:
>> moin moin,
>>
>> I have some dynamically generated PDFs coming from a pool of web servers.
>>
>> Each server should be generating a PDF that looks exactly the same as from
>> all the other servers.
>>
>> The PDF generation includes sticking in a few timestamps and possibly some
>> hostnames or other dynamic content. The dynamic content eliminates the
>> option of just using checksums to verify the output file is the same from
>> all of the web servers.
>>
>> Any suggestions on how I can write a command line check. Needing to
>> install a script would be far less than ideal in this situation. Funnily
>> enough, needing to install a package would be less of an issue in this
>> particular case, especially something in CentOS 6.
>>
>> Me being me, I did try to just grep out the lines with timestamps :). That
>> didn't quite work :(. That probably indicates the files aren't as exactly
>> the same as I hope.
>>
>> I didn't see a pdf2sanity tool. pdf2text won't really work as I need to
>> verify the graphic content and hopefully the PDF wrapper.
>>
>> ciao,
>>
>> der.hans
>
>

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