com­pare­pdf­cmd changes

Our ecommerce provider, MyCommerce (owned by Digital River Inc.) stopped paying us (and it appears, many others, see The Register) in August 2024.

We no longer trust any ecommerce provider. We do not have in-house expertise either in security or in tax regulations, so we are not able to handle payments ourselves. In view of this Qtrac Ltd. has now ceased trading, and will be wound up in due course.

We recommend that any customers with unacquired license keys acquire them as soon as possible. We hope to keep the website going for a while, and we hope to keep providing support as long as possible. All keys will continue to work as before. In particular, “full” keys will continue to work so long as the hardware/BIOS doesn't change, and annual keys will continue until their normal expiry date, regardless of hardware changes. Our software does not “phone home” and does not depend on our website. (In fact, some customers use our software entirely offline.)

We are very sorry for the inconvenience to our customers, and grateful for all those who have purchased our PDF comparison software over the past decade.

Qtrac Ltd. is selling its console command line PDF comparison software, comparepdfcmd. Although comparepdfcmd has proved a successful product in its own right, it is only a thin wrapper around our Rust-based PDF comparison engine. This engine could also be used in a GUI PDF comparison application, or to provide the back-end of a web-based PDF comparison app. Interested parties should contact mark@qtrac.eu for a prospectus.

This software is for sale or resale in the US and most countries outside Europe. (Why?)

2.4.2

• New .csv output format. By default comparepdfcmd will output in the “normal” .csv format. However, if the -C or --config option is used and the configuration file contains the lines:

  [report]
  csv=special
  

  then the new format will be used. These formats are both described in the manual.
• Fixed bug which meant that some PDF reports did not show the changes. This bug is extremely rare and due to a bug in the PDF library which we use and which we have now worked around.

2.4.1

• License clarification.

2.4.0

• Switched to annual license keys only. These are not tied to the hardware and may be transferred (moved) freely from one computer to another. These licenses can be purchased singly. (Existing “full” license keys continue to work normally.) Run comparepdfcmd.exe -h to see (at the end) which license key is in use, what its expiry is, and where the key is located.
• License changes.

2.3.3

• License changes.

2.3.2

• Library updates.
• License changes.

2.3.1

• Updated libraries—in many cases, faster than ever.
• A Windows update caused comparepdfcmd.exe cid to sometimes output WMI error: HRESULT Call failed with: 0x80010119. This should now be fixed.

2.3.0

• Added new [report] option scalablepdf=true. By default comparepdfcmd outputs scalable PDF reports, but in some rare cases this can fail. For such cases use a configuration file with a [report] section that has scalablepdf=false; this will output PDF reports the same way that diffpdfc does.
• Updated libraries and various minor code improvements.

2.2.3

• Updated libraries and various minor code improvements. In some cases, slightly faster (especially on Windows 7).

2.2.2

• Updated libraries and various minor code improvements. In many cases, significantly faster on Windows 7.

2.2.1

• Fixed a subtle bug where pages with no text produced an error. Now they compare correctly.
• Updated libraries and various minor code improvements.

2.2.0

• Updated libraries and various minor code improvements. This should result in slightly improved performance in some cases.

2.1.9

• Updated the application, license, and documentation to use www.diffpdf.com in favor of www.qtrac.eu. This should make no practical difference since both domains are synonyms (which map to diffpdf.appspot.com under the hood). We've done this in case the rules for .eu domains change in the future.
• Various library updates. Overall these result in our test suite running noticably faster although the speed benefits vary from case to case.
• Fixed a tiny robustness issue for a very rare corner case.

2.1.8

• Fixed a tiny subtle long-standing bug where setting normalize-hyphens, ignore-hyphens, and normalize-ligatures, in a .ini configuration file, was ignored. Now they are correctly recognized.
• Minor library updates.

2.1.7

• Added support for doing appearance mode comparisons with the “new” renderer. In some rare cases the “old” renderer doesn't detect some texture or gradient fill differences—but the new renderer does.
• Minor library updates.

2.1.6

• Added support for the -D or --maxdirdepth option. By default when comparing two folders of PDFs, com­pare­pdf­cmd.exe looks in the folders specified, and their subfolders, and subsubfolders, and so on. Using -D 1 ensures that only the specified folders are looked in and all subfolders are ignored.
• Fixed a bug that meant an error message was output at the start of the --help text.

2.1.5

• When reading configuration and key files, ignores the BOM (byte order mark) if present. (For example, Notepad sometimes saves files with a BOM in UTF-8 mode.)
• Updated libraries.

2.1.4

• Updated libraries, including the PDF library.

2.1.3

• The cid.exe application is no longer needed or supplied (which is why the .zip is smaller), since com­pare­pdf­cmd.exe can now discover the Computer ID for itself. This should make startup times slightly faster.
• Updated libraries and various internal improvements.

2.1.2

• Fixed a bug which meant that PNG reports sometimes showed the wrong path.
• (Internal changes: replaced sharedlib with libloading for DLLs, and changed internal PDF-handling APIs; replaced error-chain with XError and made minor changes to some error messages.)

2.1.1

• Added a new .ini configuration file option in the [report] section, show-field-content. This defaults to false. If you use a configuration file with this set to true, then the content of form fields will be output in PDF reports. (This is done automatically for other report formats.)

2.1.0

• Updated libraries and various internal improvements.
• Added support for annual license keys. These are not tied to the hardware, so are ideal for virtual machines. However, they are only available in selected countries to selected customers, and have a minimum order, so the minimum purchase is at least $1,800 USD.

2.0.2

• Fixed some small bugs in messages about free trial expiry.

2.0.1

• Updated libraries and various internal improvements.
• Fixed bug which could have made acquiring and registering a full license key fail. (The web site now works around the bug, so registering should always succeed even with version 2.0.0.)

2.0.0

• Password-protected PDFs can now be compared if you give the password(s) on the command line. (See the --password1 and --password2 command line options.)
• The colors used to highlight differences in PDF and PNG reports can now be customized. (See the Color Options described in the manual.)
• Difference reports can now be output in XML format, in addition to CSV, JSON, PDF, and PNG.
• By default JSON and XML reports are human-readable, but they can be minimized using the compact configuration file option.
• Updated libraries and various internal improvements.

1.3.0

• Implemented an optimization which can improve speed by a few percent in many cases.
• Updated libraries and minor internal improvements.

1.2.2

• Updated libraries and minor internal improvements.
• Updated so that it is compatible with MyCommerce Share-IT Order IDs as well as the old MyCommerce RegNow Order IDs.

1.2.1

• Updated some libraries (bug fixes and a tiny speed improvement).
• Improved some error handling and reporting.
• Updated the license.

1.2.0

• Updated to use a new PDF library that supports the new PDF 2 standard, in addition to the existing PDF 1.x standards that previous versions support. In many use cases the new library uses less memory and is faster.
• Updated some of the other libraries com­pare­pdf­cmd uses.

1.1.8

• Added a new .ini configuration file option in the [report] section, path-in-title. This defaults to true, which means that the full path of compared PDFs is included in reports. If set to false, then only the filenames of compared PDFs is included.
• Updated some of the libraries com­pare­pdf­cmd uses.

1.1.7

• Bug fix: The accuracy setting in a .ini configuration file is no longer ignored.
• Updated some of the libraries com­pare­pdf­cmd uses.

1.1.6

• Added a scale option which can be set in a .ini configuration file's [report] section. This only affects PNG reports. It allows PNG reports to have much higher resolution output if required.
• Updated some of the libraries com­pare­pdf­cmd uses.

1.1.5

• Added support for JSON reports (.jsn or .json).
• Updated some of the libraries com­pare­pdf­cmd uses.

1.1.4

• Added a highlight-transparency option which can be set in a .ini configuration file's [general] section. This makes it possible for you to set the balance between how visible the highlighting is vs. how clearly the highlighted differences show through.
• Changed the default highlight transparency to 80% for PDF difference reports (before it was 85%). This makes the highlighting stronger, and still leaves the differences visible. It also makes the highlighting consistent with PNG reports whose default has always been 80%.

1.1.3

• Minor updates to the manual and libraries used by com­pare­pdf­cmd.

1.1.2

• Eliminated the dependency on the Windows wmic program by bundling our cid.exe program in the package and using it to obtain the Computer ID.

1.1.1

• Bug fix: com­pare­pdf­cmd now correctly prevents overwriting the PDF files or folders being compared if the same file or folder is mistakenly used as the report file or folder.

1.1.0

• Running com­pare­pdf­cmd.exe try will try to acquire and register a free trial license key, so after running this command you can freely use com­pare­pdf­cmd for up to 20 days.
• Added a getkey option. After you've bought one or more licenses, to acquire a license on a particular computer, once com­pare­pdf­cmd has been installed on it, run com­pare­pdf­cmd.exe getkey order-id where order-id is the Order ID that appeared on the payment confirmation page (and which is also emailed to you). This will take you to the “get key” page with both the Order ID and Computer ID correctly filled in. Then, once you've clicked the issue license key button, you can register the key by running com­pare­pdf­cmd.exe register key.
• Added a -s or --show option. If the PDFs are different and -r or --report is used to get a PDF report, this option will make com­pare­pdf­cmd show the report in your PDF reader.
• Added a -m or --manual or manual option. Use this option to show com­pare­pdf­cmd's manual in your PDF reader.
• If you use the license option, com­pare­pdf­cmd will show the license in your PDF reader rather than as text output to the console.
• If you use the try or buy option, com­pare­pdf­cmd will try to open the web page you need to visit, in addition to explaining how to get a free trial or buy a license key.

1.0.1

• When comparing two folders of PDF files, report folders and subfolder are now only created when necessary, i.e., when there are differences to save in a report.

1.0.0

• First public release of this diffpdfc alternative.

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