Fast comparison
of large PDF files of EPLAN Projects

The EPLAN ECAD system is used to develop control cabinets, electrical circuit diagrams, cabling, and fluid diagrams. For documentation and communication purposes, the complete EPLAN project can be exported to a PDF document. Depending on the complexity, such a document often consists of several hundred pages. Every change to these complex systems results in new versions of these large PDF documents.

Especially when users do not have access to the native EPLAN data, identifying, tracking, and documenting all changes is very time-consuming. The Difference View EPLAN is based on the COYODO Difference View. The goal was to drastically reduce the time required to compare two EPLAN versions, which often took several days. If only minor changes have been made, it is now possible to get a rough overview of the changes within minutes.

You can also refer to our tutorial to learn how the COYODO Difference View works in general and what options it offers.

If you want to make the comparison process much more efficient for your company too, let's look at a real-life example together. A new, 356-page version of an only slightly modified EPLAN PDF document is to be compared with the previous version.

For a better understanding, let's take a closer look at the changes on pages 301 to 305 of this new version.

The COYODO multipage comparison first assigns the matching pages to each other AI-based – especially after pages have been added, deleted, or moved. In this case, page 2 was newly inserted, so that the aforementioned page 301 of the new version must be compared with page 300 of the previous version.

As a result, a page overview is generated and inserted into the Difference View. An icon shows the degree of correlation between the two pages. You can quickly navigate through the Difference View by jumping directly from the page overview to a specific page comparison. The same applies when jumping back to the page overview.

By colour-coding the changed content (old = red, new = blue), you can see on closer inspection that the title block has been slightly changed in all comparisons. Only page 304 has also been changed in terms of content – this is also evident from the lower degree of correlation of 94%.

The COYODO Difference Mask darkens the pages with a transparent gray mask. Areas with changes, however, remain white and immediately catch the eye – in the example, the seven numbered areas #536 to #542.

For familiar, company-specific title blocks, changes that are repeated on every page (version, editor, editing date, etc.) can also be dimmed. This allows users to focus automatically on the important changes to the content.

At the same time, comparisons without content changes are rated as “100% matching”. This significantly increases the information content of the page overview. The number of marked areas with changes is reduced considerably, so that in the example only area #165 on the content-changed page 304 remains.

Optionally, all page comparisons with 100% correlation can now be filtered out. These comparisons are listed in the page overview, but are not transferred to the Difference View.

The result is a much shorter document that only contains pages with content changes. In our example, the number of page comparisons displayed drops from 356 to 101. This enables highly efficient document comparison.

Finally, it is also possible to exclude pages with specific, company-specific EPLAN Structure Codes. This is particularly relevant for tables, bills of materials, and tables of contents, which are difficult to compare graphically. This further shortens the Difference View EPLAN. In the example, the number of page comparisons would drop again from 101 to 74.

Conclusion

Thanks to a range of useful functions, the Difference View EPLAN allows you to reliably identify version changes in EPLAN PDF documents in a fraction of the time it would take to compare them manually page by page. You automatically receive a PDF file for documenting and communicating the changes to your customers and suppliers.