How do I compare 2 versions of the same document on Pages?
MacBook Pro
There is no OS X visual tool that can open two Pages documents, and show the differences between them — other than the human eye.
What information are you interested in identifying as different between the two documents? What specific version of Pages?
Pages 5.6.1
I have a document over 350 pages long of notes following 5 years of study which has been duplicated and reviewed by various other people and somehow become 2 copies not one and some amendments are on one and some on the other - I would like to avoid having to go through every page line by line making sure I miss nothing! Silly mistake to have made ... but I cannot see any way around. It has been suggested I could transfer to another form - any idea which would be best, please?
There is a file comparison tool in Adobe Acrobat to use on exported .pdf files.
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/compare-documents.html
Apple also has File Comparison Software in its Developer Tools which are free.
http://www.reedolsen.com/mac-os-x-file-comparison-software-no-longer-needed/
Another place you might look:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools
Kaleidoscope is quite nice:
http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/
Peter
The free LibreOffice has an Edit menu : Compare Documents… Merge, and it shows the original text in black and the difference text in blue. You can even view this in two-page up if you wish. PDF documentation for LibreOffice Writer is here. Might be worth a closer look with copies of two different original Pages documents that have been exported to Word's .docx format.
Word for Mac or Windows has a Tools menu : Track Changes : Compare Documents feature, where you open one word document, specify another, and the changes will be detailed in a third newly created Word document. What I don't know is if you need two documents that have been using change (tracking) management during their evolution.
As Peter mentioned, Adobe Acrobat Pro can compare two PDF documents, but not Reader. The Filemerge utility in the Apple Developer tools works on text only, and will raise ____ when you specify two Pages documents. I many references on the web to Filemerge comparing other documents, and those suggestions are wrong. Kaleidoscope, like Filemerge, works on pure text files or images. It rejects Pages documents as unsupported file types.
Of course, you could open two different named, Pages documents side-by-side with the Format panel hidden, and the thumbnail views enabled. As you dreaded, that would be the brute force approach.
Many thanks
How do I compare 2 versions of the same document in Pages?
