Here’s the problem: You have two InDesign documents of the same job which are filled with text – but you don’t know which one to use. You could spend a lot of time reading page after page of text trying to determine which document is the one you want, but there’s an easier way. I picked-up this tip from Anne-Marie Concepción over at InDesign Magazine some time ago and it’s fantastic for comparing two InDesign documents to find the differences. Obviously, this tip is most useful for documents containing a LOT of text. Read on to see how easy it is.

Export both documents as PDF files, giving each one a unique name. Then simply open the documents in Acrobat 8 or 9 and got to Document>Compare Documents. A dialog box will appear with the names of the two documents you have open. Choose which type of document it is at the bottom of the dialog (magazine/text style doc, illustration, or scanned documents).

A report will be generated (as seen above) letting you know that differences exist in the documents.

You can then view the pages showing you what the differences are in the documents as seen in the screenshot above. The report displays deletions, additions, changes and more.