Diff Tool for some binary (non-executable) formats

Question

I'm looking for a visual diff tool for Mac OS X that will allow me to see differences in Pages (from Apple's iWork suite) and Adobe Illustrator documents. I realize a visual diff may be a little much to ask, so I'd settle for some sort of XML or plain-text comparison. I'm using Pages to maintain my Spec and Illustrator for my mockups, which are all version-controlled, and would love to be able to easily see the differences.

FileMerge (which ships with Xcode) just barfs up gobbledygook, so binary comparisons definitely won't work. I know about Kaleidoscope , which does support diffs on various image formats (and seems to be an all-around good solution), but it doesn't seem that it supports Pages or Illustrator.

Answer 1

Araxis Merge has a lot of different file-format viewers. Straight up binary is one of them, if that will get the job done for you. It will do PDF and various other image formats as well.

Answer 2

I don't know about Illustrator files, but Pages has an XML portion. If you open the .pages file with unzip, there is an index.xml file containing all of the text and style information for the file, which you can then compare with diff or FileMerge.