Compare documents with different structure

Conversation between Compare PDF's user and AKS Support representative:

Problem description:

Evaluating the product. One common problem I have found with compare software is when a text file has had a record inserted - all remaining records get tagged/flagged/colored indicating they do not match the original.

Is there a way in your product to\"ignore" a record in a text file? a simple function to \"right-click\" on the line number and select "ignore" (change the number color to indicate so) and poof, the rest of the file would show up fine.

Or, add some intelligence for the compare algorithm to look forward (as it obviously does in word docs) and just consider the single record as "added".

Or, maybe you already have this functionality and I just don\'t see it. Can you help? Your product looks like a very useful tool, but I need to find one that will do what I described.

Suggested solution

Compare PDF compares two files and it's not an easy task to compare text files in a right way, especially if lots of changes were made within document structure.

As for MS Word, then it is good for MS Word's documents, but will not do for simple text files or documents with highly different structure.

To make comparison more handy we have implemented another feature: you can select text on the left panel and select text on the right panel. Then you can right click and compare that texts (paragraphs). 

Thank you for your interest, and thank you for your ideas.

User's feedback

Thanks for your quick response. Perhaps your product is not exactly what I am looking for, but I encourage you to consider the situation I proposed and some simple approach to addressing it.

Additional suggestion

As to my opinion there is no such a powerful program.

I can suggestion see three solutions:
- Use any comparison tool, for example Compare PDF to compare file and get this hard to read and analyze results;
- Ask someone for custom software development to create a program that will consider comparing the files you have;
- Try to split large file into a smaller ones so comparison utilities will serve you well in this case;

Hope it was useful!