Diff Tool for some binary (non-executable) formats

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Diff Tool for some binary (non-executable) formats

I'm looking for a visual diff tool for Mac OS X that will allow me to see differences in Pages (from Apple's iWork suite) and Adobe Illustrator documents. I realize a visual diff may be a little much to ask, so I'd settle for some sort of XML or plain-text comparison. I'm using Pages to maintain my Spec and Illustrator for my mockups, which are all version-controlled, and would love to be able to easily see the differences.

FileMerge (which ships with Xcode) just barfs up gobbledygook, so binary comparisons definitely won't work. I know about Kaleidoscope, which does support diffs on various image formats (and seems to be an all-around good solution), but it doesn't seem that it supports Pages or Illustrator.

Araxis Merge has a lot of different file-format viewers. Straight up binary is one of them, if that will get the job done for you. It will do PDF and various other image formats as well.

Carl Norum 2010-09-07 17:56:40

While they support MS Office (http://www.araxis.com/merge_mac/topic_comparing_text_files.html) and some other non-plain-text formats, Pages is not one of them, and I didn't see evidence of Illustrator support in their image comparison. Unfortunately, binary comparison is not good enough, since I want to be able to actually see what changed, not just how much.

Dov 2010-09-07 18:10:19

@Dov, I think you will find it difficult or impossible to find a diff tool that has built-in understanding of the Pages format. You might want to pick a text-based documentation format to make your life easier - LaTeX is a popular option. Good luck in your search!

Carl Norum 2010-09-07 20:59:28

I can dream :-)

Dov 2010-09-07 23:09:37

ansaurus

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Diff Tool for some binary (non-executable) formats

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