How to Compare Similarities Between Two PDF Files in Acrobat
Question details
The user wants to know if Adobe Acrobat can directly identify and list matching words or sentences shared between two different PDF files.
- Product
- Adobe Acrobat
- Device & OS
- not provided
- Scenario
- Comparing two PDF files to identify duplicated, matching, or plagiarized content.
- Observed behavior
- Acrobat's built-in Compare Documents tool highlights differences and revisions between drafts, rather than generating a list of similarities for unrelated files.
Ensure both PDF files are text-searchable. If you are working with scanned documents, you will need to perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) first to extract the text.
Extract Text and Use a Dedicated Similarity Checker
Since Acrobat primarily finds differences, the most effective way to find matching sentences is to convert the PDFs to text and use a specialized similarity or plagiarism tool.
Adobe Acrobat's Compare feature is built for version control, meaning it points out what was added, deleted, or modified. To find exact matching phrases between two completely unrelated documents, extracting the text is required.
Open your first PDF in Acrobat, go to File > Export To, and select either Microsoft Word or Text (Plain Text). Repeat this process for the second PDF file.
Choose a dedicated document-comparison or plagiarism-detection tool online (such as Copyscape, Turnitin, or a free text similarity checker).
Upload your newly extracted text files into the chosen tool and run the scan. The software will analyze the text and highlight the exact similarities and matching paragraphs.
Use Acrobat's Compare Tool for Revision Deduction
If the two files are related drafts, you can use Acrobat to view the differences and deduce the similarities based on what remains unchanged.
Easily Extract and Compare PDF Content with WPS Office
Use WPS Office to quickly convert your PDFs into editable Word documents. Once converted, you can easily use text comparison tools to find similarities, matching paragraphs, and shared content between any two files.
- 1. Open your PDF: Launch WPS Office and open your first PDF document.
- 2. Convert PDF to Word: Navigate to the Tools tab and click on 'PDF to Word'. Follow the prompts to save the file as a DOCX. Repeat for the second PDF.
- 3. Open in WPS Writer: Open both newly converted Word documents in WPS Writer.
- 4. Compare or View Side-by-Side: Go to the View tab to place the documents side-by-side, or copy the extracted text into your preferred similarity detection tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does Acrobat's Compare tool only show differences?
Acrobat's Compare Documents tool is designed for document revision tracking. Its primary purpose is to help users find what was added, deleted, or modified between drafts, rather than identifying plagiarized or similar text blocks in unrelated files.
Can I compare scanned PDFs for similarities?
Yes, but you cannot compare them directly as images. You must first apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in your PDF editor to convert the scanned images into readable, searchable text before running any comparison or extraction tool.
Are there dedicated tools for finding similarities in PDFs?
Yes. While standard PDF editors focus on formatting and revisions, plagiarism detection software (like Turnitin, Grammarly, or Copyscape) are specifically built to compare text files and PDFs to find matching sentences and calculate similarity percentages.
