Quality assurance on PDF rendering (image compare?)

[Jfish]

Hello all.  I am trying to figure out the best approach to compare PDF outputs for consistency.  Currently, this is a human task where PDFs are held up to a light to see if all the values line up exactly with test data.  I have to believe there is a better way.  That said GDIPlus is a bit of a mystery to me - I have looked at some of the functions - and I stumbled upon >this very useful script in my forum search.  My question is: would converting the PDF to an image and comparing the image with GDIPlus be the way to go or is there a different more efficient approach that you would recommend?  Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

JFish

[this-is-me]

Not an AutoIt solution, but you might consider Perceptual Image Diff if you are going to convert to images. http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/

[Jfish]

@this-is-me - Thanks.  That does look like an interesting package.   I will keep it in mind as the suggestions (hopefully) roll in.  I guess my threshold question is do I need to convert the PDFs to images for a comparison (seems like many tools may facilitate this) or is there another (better) way?

Edited November 21, 2014 by Jfish

[Geir1983]

I guess you could try to use the imagesearch.au3 and keep increasing the tolerance until it is a match to your original picture?

Edit: there is a version of the imagesearch you can pass a HBMP to search in, instead of your desktop.

Edited November 21, 2014 by Geir1983

[Jfish]

I also learned that Adobe Acrobat can do a PDF comparison without converting file types.  That may be an option ... still looking ...

Edited November 21, 2014 by Jfish

[mLipok]

  On 11/21/2014 at 2:53 PM, this-is-me said:

Not an AutoIt solution, but you might consider Perceptual Image Diff if you are going to convert to images. http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/

 

look here:

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[Jfish]

@mLipok thanks for the tip.  I am still not sure what the best approach is but I will take a look at this.  Thx.

[mLipok]

btw.

If you want to convert PDF to image file, you can use Debenu PDF Library (look in my sign for UDF).

 

  Quote

Description

Renders certain pages from the selected document to an image file on disk.

By default rendering uses the GDI+ system which is available by default in Windows XP and later.

Option 10, TIFF (G4) output, is only available on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 and later.

It is also possible to render using Cairo, use the SetCairoFileName and SelectRenderer functions.

Syntax

ActiveX

Function DebenuPDFLibrary1113.PDFLibrary::RenderDocumentToFile(

DPI As Double, StartPage As Long, EndPage As Long,

Options As Long, FileName As String) As Long

Parameters

DPI The DPI to use for the rendering. A value of 72 will give the same result as Acrobat

when the zoom level is 100%.

StartPage The first page to print

EndPage The last page to print

Options

0 = BMP output

1 = JPEG output

2 = WMF output

3 = EMF output

4 = EPS output

5 = PNG output

6 = GIF output

7 = TIFF output

8 = EMF+ output

9 = HTML5 output

10 = G4 TIFF output

FileName The path and filename to use for the file.

Each page will be stored in a separate file.

If this parameter contains "%p" this will be replaced by the page number, otherwise

the page number will be appended to the end of the filename before the extension.

For example, if FileName is "output.jpg" and page 10 is rendered the image will be

stored in a file called "output10.jpg".

If FileName is "page%poutput.bmp" and page 5 is rendered the image will be stored

in a file called "page5output.bmp".

Return values

0 The pages were not rendered successfully. This is usually caused by the StartPage or

EndPage parameters being out of range.

1 The pages were rendered successfully

EDIT: REMARKS: this function need commercial version of this library.

Edited December 13, 2014 by mLipok