Acrobat Compare Documents: "Acrobat could not compare the documents completely."

There is a bug with Acrobat X and XI Pro that does not allow you to compare PDF documents created from unknown applications. We use XMetaL Author Enterprise and Acrobat considers it an unknown application. You can verify the application setting of your PDF from File > Properties.



I entered a bug report with Adobe on 4 April 2013.

To work around this bug, you can save the PDFs as Word documents and create new PDFs from Word before comparing them in Acrobat. The new PDFs have Microsoft Word associated with them and compare successfully.

1. Open a PDF to compare.
2. From the File menu, select Save As Other > Microsoft Word > Word Document.
3. Save the file to your computer.
4. In Windows Explorer, right-click the Word document and select Convert to Adobe PDF.
5. Save the file to your computer.
6. Repeat Step 1 through Step 5 for the second PDF to compare.
7. Compare the new PDFs (View > Compare Documents).

These steps are also useful to convert a PDF to a Word document, if that format is needed.

Hope this helps others! If anyone has another way around this issue, I am interested to hear.