XenCompare
A Windows desktop utility for comparing two revisions of a technical PDF drawing, reviewing detected changes and exporting a branded PDF report with an Excel workbook. One-time purchase. Runs on Windows 10 and later.
XenCompare compares the first page of each PDF, one page pair at a time. It does not batch-compare multi-page drawing sets.
What it does
Drop in the original drawing and the revised one. XenCompare aligns the two pages, detects visual differences and numbers them. Detected differences are classified as Added, Removed or Modified, and as a line, a point or an area.
Difference focus dims the drawing and paints changes bright inside numbered clouds. Side by side links pan and zoom across both sheets. Overlay draws the original in green and the revised in red with shared geometry dark. Highlight shows the differences alone on black.
Work down the numbered list and mark each difference Confirmed, Ignored, or leave a comment. Selecting one renders a before and after crop of that exact spot. Comments are timestamped, and your review work — including anything dismissed as a false detection — survives re-aligning and rescanning. Check the alignment and review the detected differences before relying on the comparison or issuing the report.
A PDF report on your own letterhead: a cover page with the comparison facts and your logo, a full-page visual comparison with the numbered clouds, and a table with before and after crops. An .xlsx workbook carries the same table with a frozen header and filters.
Technical details
- All processing runs locally using PDFium, in a separate worker process so a malformed file cannot take the app down with it.
- Source PDFs are always opened read-only. Neither input file is ever modified.
- Comparison uses rendered pixels rather than document text, allowing comparison of PDFs from different sources that the rendering engine can open.
- Detection is designed to suppress anti-aliasing fringe and reduce false detections. Review the detected differences and confirm alignment.
- Detection is line-aware: crossing lines stay thin, and a moved line is reported as one difference rather than two separate edge strips.
- A second finer pass catches glyph-sized edits — a revision letter or a changed digit — that a tolerance wide enough for linework would otherwise swallow.
- The two drawings are aligned automatically when you open them. You can nudge, rotate and scale the revised sheet by hand, or turn both 90° for a sideways source.
- If the fit is poor the comparison stays provisional, and the report is watermarked DRAFT — a provisional comparison cannot be mistaken for a final one.
- Every export is a new file you name, written through a temporary file so a failure never leaves half a report behind.
- No account, no internet connection, and no telemetry.
What it does not do
- Edit, annotate, or modify the source PDFs in any way
- Compare text content or document metadata — comparison is visual, not textual
- Compare more than one page pair at a time — only the first page of each file is compared, and the app says so when it sees more
- Perform optical character recognition (OCR)
- Connect to any cloud service or require sign-in