For this blog entry I want to take you through the steps of comparing two drawings and showing you how this feature works. The first step is to simply open Acrobat 9 and choose from the top menu Document - Compare Documents. The following screen will launch and you will pick the two revisions you want to compare.
Once I have chosen the two revisions that I want to compare and the document type I simply click OK and the process will start. For drawings it is analyzing vector data so it my take a little more time than a text document, but not much. Once the process is completed it will let you know in the summary if any changes have been found. The easiest way to navigate to the changes is to simply zoom in to a percentage of about 50% and then open up the comments tab as shown in the screen below.
If you click on the comments in the comments tab it will take you directly to each change that has been made. Then if you click directly on the comment it will show you the changes between the two.
When you think about your current process and the time and effort involved in tracking changes between revisions, you can easily see why the McGraw Hill Interoperability number was at 46% for time lost to document version checking. This is a great new feature for Acrobat 9 with the expansion of the types of documents and the detail the document comparison provides.
Have fun,
Jonathan
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