pdfparanoia/tests/diff/README.md

`comparediffs` provides a tool which
* downloads a PDF from two different sources,
* runs `pdfparanoia` on both files, and
* compares the outputs byte-for-byte.

Typical usage is to first establish two `ssh` tunnels to hosts with access to the literature, e.g. via
`ssh -D 1080 host1` and `ssh -D 1081 host2`. You can then invoke `comparediffs` via

    ./comparediffs localhost:1080 localhost:1081 < urls

where `urls` is a file containing one URL per line (e.g. the example file in this directory).

`comparediffs` creates a subdirectory `pdf/`, in which is stores PDFs. It won't try to download the same PDF twice, so if you make changes to `pdfparanoia` you'll
want to clean out some or all of this subdirectory.

It's easy to see which PDFs `pdfparanoia` failed on afterwards, as it leaves copies of the scrubbed files with suffixes `.1.cleaned.pdf` and `.2.cleaned.pdf`.
When `pdfparanoia` succeeds (or isn't even needed, because the downloaded files were identical), the scrubbed files are removed.