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Compare a Word Document to a PDF

Compare a Word draft against a PDF, including a scanned PDF. Version Story reads both formats and produces one redline showing every change between them.

Overview

The other side sends their revised draft as a PDF, and your last version is in Word. Or you have a signed, scanned copy and want to confirm it matches the final draft. Version Story compares the two directly. You do not need to convert either file first.

What can be compared

  • Word documents (.docx and .doc) and PDFs, in any combination: Word against Word, Word against PDF, or PDF against PDF.
  • Scanned PDFs. Version Story reads the scanned pages with OCR (optical character recognition), which turns the image of each page back into text that can be compared.
  • Files up to 100 MB each.

A PDF takes longer to compare than a Word document, because it is converted before the comparison runs.

When the PDF is a redline

Sometimes what comes back is itself a redline: a PDF with insertions underlined in blue and deletions struck through in red, as Litera and Version Story print them. Version Story turns that markup into tracked changes when it converts the PDF, so the Word version of the PDF has real insertions and deletions you can accept or reject, including in tables, headers and footers, and footnotes. Moved text marked in green becomes a deletion where it was and an insertion where it went.

A comparison against that PDF reads it as its revised text, the same way it reads a Word document with pending tracked changes. See Documents with Tracked Changes.

Compare in the Version Story app

  1. Open your project and add both files as versions. See Add Documents.
  2. Connect the two versions to create the redline. See Compare Documents for each way of doing this.
  3. Open the redline in the document viewer, or download it.

Compare in Claude or ChatGPT

With Version Story connected to Claude or ChatGPT, attach both files and ask:

Compare these two with Version Story. The Word file is my draft and the PDF is what came back.

Checking a scanned copy against the final draft

To confirm that a signed, scanned agreement matches the draft that was agreed, compare the Word draft against the scan. A clean redline with no changes in the body means the text matches. Signatures, stamps, and handwritten dates on the scan are not text in the draft, so expect them to appear as differences.