Diff PDFs by converting them to HTML and diffing that

[Mr0grog]

This should not necessarily replace a differ for actual PDF content, but it could potentially be a lot more useful when it works well: instead of trying to diff two PDF files, convert the PDF to HTML (there are at least a few open-source libraries for this) and feed that through the HTML differ.

Not sure what the right name for this is.

Lizz brought this up in Slack and, though I remember having a short discussion about the idea before, I can’t find anywhere we’ve written it down, hence this issue.

[Mr0grog]

Potentially useful article on PDF text extraction in Python I ran across today: https://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2018/05/03/exporting-data-from-pdfs-with-python/

[stale]

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[Mr0grog]

Definitely still a relevant idea.