2 or 3-way merge of word or pdf files

Question

So I am not sure if this exists, so I am asking the wise folks for StackOverflow for some help.

I am looking for a 2 or 3-way (preferably) document merging tool that works great with either MS Word documents or PDFs. What I have are multiple documents that I want to merge together by taking pages and sections from these documents and merging them into one single document.

I thought that the best way to do this is to use a 3-way merging tool to help me perform this merge. I've taken a look at the following merge tools:

Araxis Merge
Beyond Compare 4
Compare It!
DeltaWalker 2.1.1
DiffMerge
ExamDiff Pro 7.0
Meld
SmartSynchronize
WinMerge
UltraCompare

None of these quite fit my needs. Most can't read PDFs and Word Docs. The few that can, only UltraCompare I could get to save the changes. However, the compare only imports the text (all images are lost) and the changes are saved in .rtf format, so I lose a lot of the formatting. I want to be able to save back to the original format.

Has anyone used a tool that can cleanly merge Word and/or PDF documents together by allowing the import of sections/pages?

Answer 1

You can use TE Edit Control to append a number of RTF/DOCX/DOC documents into a visible or invisible control, and then save the combined document as a single RTF or DOCX formatted document. The control supports the pictures, tables, etc.

Answer 2

In Word 2007 and later, "Review > Compare > Combine Documents..." can perform a three-way merge, although it's a two step process:

• Merge the original and first revision
• Merge the combined version and the second revision

Word will "do the right thing" and show both combinations in Track Changes, with proper author attribution.

Detailed instructions with (more) screenshots are in this MS article, upon which the below is based.

For example, say we have a file called "master.docx", and two branches of that file, "master-branch1.docx" and "master-branch2.docx", both of which were copied from "master.docx" and separately modified.

• Open "master.docx" (or any other file - you just need to be able to get to the Review menu)
• Select "Review > Compare > Combine Documents..."
• Select the original (master.docx) as the "Original" document on the left
• Select the first branch (master-branch1.docx) as the "Revised" document on the right
• Enter the author of each version in the "Label unmarked changes with" box (e.g. you on the Original side, the person who edited master-branch1.docx on the right). After the merge, these names will show in "track changes" and in comments (note: you don't need to have Track Changes turned on).
• Click OK and save as a new document, e.g. "master-v2.docx"
• Select "Review > Compare > Combine Documents..." again
• Select the new master (master-v2.docx) as the "Original" document on the left
• Select the second branch (master-branch2.docx) as the "Revised" document on the right
• Enter the author names in the "Label unmarked changes with" boxes (under Original, enter the same thing you entered there last time, and under Revised enter the author of the second set of changes). Again, you could also enter "Master" and "Branch 2" respectively.
• Click the disclosure triangle and select "Original document" to save the changes in. This saves your changes back into master-v2.docx instead of making yet another document. (You might be able to do that with master.docx too, but wiping out your master as you're reading this is probably a bad idea ;-) ).
• Click OK

master-v2.docx will now contain the 3-way-merged document with the changes highlighted and comments containing the authors of each change. The Review Pane will also show a list of the changes.

If you have more than 2 branches (e.g. you emailed the document to 30 people and asked them for edits), you can repeat using "Combine Changes" on master-v2.docx/master-branch3.docx master-v2.docx/master-branch4.docx ... master-v2.docx/master-branch30.docx.

Answer 3

I have ran into the same problems. Here is my 2 cents for anyone who is interested:

The tooling I checked:

• Beyond Compare 4
• Winmerge
• Meld
• Araxis Merge
• Compare It!
• DeltaWalker
• DiffMerge
• ExamDiff
• ExamDiff Pro
• SmartSynchronize
• UltraCompare
• KDiff3
• P4Merge
• Code Compare
• Diff-PDF
• Diff Checker

All are possible to compare text files, some can handle images and some handle PDF files. Unfortunately no one is able to handle images in PDF, except Diff-PDF (https://vslavik.github.io/diff-pdf/).

For textual comparison I am using KDiff and for PDF files I use Diff-PDF. Not ideal, but doable, as I prefer one tool for all.