Is it possible to compare and also overlay PDFs?

Edwin Prakoso · 2025-04-17T08:38:39+00:00

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Greetings,

I have a question that I can't seem to find the answer. Hopefully I can get some help here.

Is it possible to overlay and also compare two PDFs? When we only compare the files, we only see the cloud and sometimes it's not easy to tell what is the difference. If I can also overlay those PDFs, I can see the color to easier find the difference. So markup will tell me the location of the differences, and overlay will tell me what is the difference.

I have tried to overlay, then import markups from compared documents. But the markups placed on on wrong locations. The issue is not the page setup or scale, I checked.

I tried to compare then overlay the result, the markups are gone on the overlay.

I can get the right result by using paste in place tool. However, this is very tedious is we have a lot of pages.

Anyone has the same experience? And how do you solve it? Maybe I miss a setting or a step to do this correcly.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Edwin

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Brandon Costlow

I think the easiest answer to you question would be that it's not a thing. You can do several workarounds and hope for the best, but I just don't see a quick and easy way to get what you are looking for. Unless you're dealing with hundreds or more differences I'd just do an overlay and then go through and mark each change I see with a certain markup to make it so the markup list captures as many changes as possible, while keeping the drawings as clean as possible. You could do the comparison instead and try your best to clean it up, but I find the overlay feature more intuitive for my usual purposes.

I'm sorry I couldn't be more help, but I just tried for a couple hours to find an alternative in which I used both comparison and overlay together, but they pretty much always created a big headache of either missing many helpful changes or adding useless ones. The fewer issues I had with needing to add callouts, the more I had to delete, and the few I had to delete, the more I had to add. It just wasn't very helpful ultimately, because it caused so many interruptions to a steady workflow.

Luke Shiras

It would be an awesome feature but how much change warrants a cloud is also an issue. Sometimes a note gets shifted for better visability or a wall thinckness changed because someone thought a 6" stud was actually 6".

From a programing POV, I think the issue is how do you do both without affecting the output of the other. Meaning how does Revu decide which part to run first? Overlay → Compare, or Compare → Overlay?

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