A powerful Quality Control Tool: Analyzing the Differences Between Single Documents and Large Production Jobs.
For files not identical at the bit level, it is difficult to determine if in fact the content and layout of the file is identical, even when they have the exact same file size and name. In this situation the document objects defined in the file together with their attributes need to be analyzed and, if they are formatted differently, in such a manner that the formatting specifics of similar objects are not taken into account.
This is precisely the problem that DocBridge Delta solves, either by displaying the differences visually, or by producing a list of the differences.
HIGHLIGHTS
Comparison of documents or varying formats (large production jobs).
Visual difference representation down to the pixel level.
Detailed listing of differences at the object level.
Provision of return codes for automatic processing.
Comparison for documents in which all the pages are not correctly aligned.
Suppression of specified pages for example that contain empty pages.
Page areas containing dynamic data such as addresses can be excluded.
Consistency of meta information such as indexes in TLE’s in AFP documents.
Available for all commonly used operating systems.
FUNDAMENTAL TECHNICAL PROCESS
DocBridge Delta uses the capabilities of the DocBridge Engine to analyze the detailed structure of coded objects in the document files, to convert them to a formatindependent meta format.
Since it can process the most common document formats, it is capable of translating even the most varying document formats into a common object structure in the meta format. At the same time DocBridge Delta can compare both input documents and identify the differences object for object, either by displaying the differences visually (Like displayed below), or by producing a list of the differences.
TYPICAL USAGE SCENARIO
DocBridge Delta is particularly suitable for users of high-volume production jobs who have converted a given document to another format with the help of an application and want to check if the content and its presentation still correspond to the original. The result can be important in terms of quality control, depending on the goal to be achieved with respect to the presentation as well as the object type or resources used internally.
VISUAL COMPARISON
For the visual comparison, the two documents are rastered at the same resolution, and the resulting pixel pictures are compared – similar to using a light table in which the documents are laid over each other to identify any differences.
The file generated in this way shows individual pixels in grey, for those pixels which are the same in both documents, green for those only in the reference document and red for those only in the document being compared to. This means that even the smallest differences between objects are instantly recognizable, for example edge differences of only a single pixel wide on a slightly differently cut character of a font. If it is seen that the entire contents of a document being compared are displaced, this can be compensated for using an additional setting, to allow be able to check if apart from this displacement, other differences in the document can be identified. For the situation where entire pages are not present in one of the documents, a comparison can be suppressed so as to prevent additional empty pages from being compared. The difference document with the color highlighted comparisons is created as multi-page TIFF document.
STRUCTURAL COMPARISON AT OBJECT LEVEL
DocBridge Delta writes a detailed log of the recognized differences of each object on each page to a file. The following types of differences can be seen from the entries in the log file:
Types of checks:
Differing object positioning.
Object content differences such as text or different barcodes.
Varying attributes of the same object type including fonts or font attributes.
Before making the comparison, the two documents are converted to the Unicode- based meta format, so that even for the case where another Codepage has been used, only actual text differences are registered.
ADDITIONAL COMPARISON UTILITIES
In addition to making a comparison of the presentation of objects between two documents, DocBridge Delta can also perform the following checks:
Binary compare of two document files.
Checking the difference in size with an optional pre-selected minimum value in bits or pixels.
Comparison of the number of pages and page orientation.
Comparison based on positioning tolerance.
The exclusion of selected page areas during the comparison.
Meta information differences such as varying indexes within TLE’s.
Attached to all these messages is a return code allowing document comparisons to be evaluated automatically by a program.
SUPPORTED FORMATS
DocBridge Delta can compare documents with the same or different input formats. The following input formats are optionally supported,
MIXED OBJECT FORMATS
AFP (incl. AFP line and mixed mode)
ASCII/EBCDIC linemode
PCL
SAP GOF with formatted OTF and ALF (ABAP list format)
LCDS (DJDE)
Metacode (DJDE)
SVG
Prescribe
RASTER FORMATS
BMP
GIF
IOCA
JPEG
PCX
PNG
TGA
TIFF
SUPPORTED PLATFORMS
Microsoft Windows 2000, XP and Vista as well as Windows Server 2003, 2008
Linux
IBM AIX
Sun Solaris
HP-UX
z/OS
zLinux