Dad Joke of the Release
Why did the laptop get cold? Cause it let its Windows open🤣
What's Changed
This release transforms BentoPDF's Compare PDFs from a basic side by side viewer into a full semantic comparison engine that provides parity with commercial solutions. Every change between two PDFs including text edits, style tweaks, moved paragraphs, image modifications and annotation diffs is now detected, categorized, and navigable.
1. PDF Comparison Rewrite
Semantic Text Diffing
- Word-level diff engine with exact bounding-box highlighting on both documents
- Handles additions, deletions, modifications, and full page insertions/removals
- CJK word segmentation for accurate Chinese, Japanese, and Korean comparisons
Moved-Text Detection
- Detects paragraphs that moved position between documents (≥3 words, ≥80% Jaccard similarity)
- Collapsed into single "Moved" changes with purple highlights instead of noisy add/remove pairs
Style Change Detection
- Detects font family and font size changes on otherwise identical text
Content Category Classification
- Every detected change is automatically classified into one of six categories: Text, Image, Header/Footer, Annotation, Formatting, Background
- Header/footer detection based on y-position analysis (top/bottom 12% of page)
- Image comparison via area-overlap matching (detects added, removed, and resized images)
- Annotation diffing compares subtype, contents, and position
- Background change detection triggers when visual mismatch exceeds text change coverage
Smart Page Pairing
- Automated page-pairing model using content signatures instead of naive page-number matching
- Correctly handles inserted/deleted pages between document versions
OCR Support
- OCR for scanned documents, toggled from the toolbar
- OCR results cached in LRU cache to avoid redundant processing
- Low-quality text detection auto-triggers OCR when extracted text is unreliable
Filter System
- Change type filter pills: Modified, Added, Deleted, Moved, Style Changed
- Content category filter pills: Text, Image, Header/Footer, Annotation, Formatting, Background
PDF Export
- Four export modes: Split View, Alternating Pages, Left Document Only, Right Document Only
Bug Fixes
- Rotation fix: Corrected PDF page rotation functionality with comprehensive test coverage (380 new tests)
By the Community ❤️
- add Korean (ko) translation by @the0807 in #552
- fix correct locale path in translation guide, add missing link attributes in footer, fix wasm version in readme by @iegl3 in #553
- build(deps): bump dompurify from 3.3.1 to 3.3.2 by @dependabot[bot] in #551
- build(deps-dev): bump minimatch from 5.1.6 to 5.1.9 by @dependabot[bot] in #550
- build(deps): bump rollup from 4.55.1 to 4.59.0 by @dependabot[bot] in #522
- minor correction in documentation by @Olivetti in #531
- Pdf to image direct image by @Skillkiller in #215
New Contributors ❤️
- @the0807 made their first contribution in #552 ❤️
- @iegl3 made their first contribution in #553 ❤️
- @Olivetti made their first contribution in #531 ❤️
- @Skillkiller made their first contribution in #215 ❤️
Full Changelog: v2.4.1...v2.5.0
This was a big rewrite, so please try out the new comparison tool and report any bug fixes. Thank you! 🎉