How to compare presentations a la diff

[tpapastylianou]

This is in response to another post here with the same title (#3604), which was closed years ago but provides no useful information. I thought I’d create something to help other users with the same problem.

Currently, unlike libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-impress does not provide a way to compare two presentations from within impress.

So, in the absence of that, one effective way to compare presentations visually is to export them both as pdf, and then use a tool like “diffpdf” to visually compare the resulting pdfs instead.

[Wanderer]

If you wish to use something like diff you may try to compare the xml, especially after export as “flat” xml:

How can I uncompress a LibreOffice document to get its XML internals, then make a new document from them?

Opening a LO document as a zip file leaves you with a directory and you’ll have to manage yourself the relationships between the contained files and directories. Manipulating the various files exposes you to a risk of discrepancy or breaking implied/implicit relationships. Moreover, the raw LO document is not intended to be human-read. Consequently, XML lines may be very long and overflow common application buffers (this is the case for standard text editors). A better solution is to save the …