Compare PT files and a printed text

Question

We have a printed NT and Paratext files of the same project. Unfortunately, when the NT was printed in 2002, we did not copy the corrections after the last proofs to the PT files resulting to a situation where the printed text and the PT files are not identical when it comes to the content. Now we want to republish the text using an app.

Since we do have the pdf sent to the printer, is there any easy way to find out how the printed text and the PT files differ?

I can see two possibilities: we could turn the pdf into PT files (I hear that this is possible) and compare the two texts OR we could turn the PT files into pdf and compare the two pdfs. Which way is more reasonable or easy or reliable way to do this?

anon982572

Answer 1

Turning the pdf into PT files is unquestionably the better route. If you were to turn the PT files into pdfs and then compare the pdfs, you’d have to make sure every single line and page broke at the same point–an almost impossible task.

Depending on what language you’re using and how the pdf was created, it’s possible that you could simply highlight the text in the pdf and copy-paste into a text editor. There are also programs which will automatically extract all the text in a pdf. If that doesn’t work you’d have to look into Optical Character Recognition (OCR), where the computer tries to ‘read’ the pdf. But that’s much, much more difficult.

Once you’ve extracted the text from the pdf, you can use a lot of text programs to compare the PT and exported-pdf files. You may need help from a scripter/programmer to remove some of the usfm markers from the PT files so that you can compare the two more easily, but that shouldn’t be too difficult.