Command line parameters for comparing documents

To compare two versions of a single document in ABBYY Compare Documents, execute the following command:

Comparator.exe /compare <ImageSourceCommands> <ComparisonCommands>

Comparator.exe /compare Comparator.exe stands for the path to the Comparator.exe file in the program installation folder.
<ImageSourceCommands> - documents to be compared /file1:File_1 /file2:File_2

File_k is the path to the document.


If the full path contains spaces, put it in quotation marks.

<ComparisonCommands> - comparison settings /lang:LangName

LangName is the language of the document.


If LangName is not specified, the most recent language is used by default. You can specify several recognition languages by separating them with spaces.


For a list of supported command line recognition languages, see LangName parameter values for the command line.

Additional options:

/recMode:RecognitionMode

PDF recognition mode. Replace "RecognitionMode" with one of the following:

  • UseOnlyPdfText - uses only the text from the PDF file. This mode is enabled by default (when the /recMode:RecognitionMode option isnt specified);
  • AutoChoose - automatically selects whether to use OCR or the PDF text;
  • UseOnlyOCR - uses OCR.

For more information about document processing modes, see Improving comparison results.

Additional options:

/options:OptionsList

Replace OptionsList with one or several of the following (separated by commas):

  • NoheadersFooters - does not search for headers or footers (the program searches for headers and footers by default);
  • IgnorePunctDiff - ignores punctuation differences (the program searches for punctuation errors by default);
  • IgnoreOneLetterDiff - ignores differences that are not greater than one letter (the program looks for spelling errors by default);
  • UngroupDiff - does not group differences that have been found, including those in the text body, the headers and the footers (the program groups differences by default).

Sample command:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\ABBYY FineReader 15\Comparator.exe” /compare /file1:D:\Documents\Document1.pdf /file2:D:\Documents\Document2.pdf /lang:French /recMode:AutoChoose /options:IgnorePunctDiff,UngroupDiff

The above command will launch a comparison of the French-language documents called Document1.pdf and Document2.pdf, and will automatically determine whether to use OCR or the document text. ABBYY Compare Documents will ignore all punctuation differences and will not group the differences it finds.

To find out more about automatically saving comparison results, see Using the command line to save the comparison results on program launch.

3/4/2022 7:13:07 AM

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