Dear Monks

I find myself in charge of a large number of PDF documents produced by a document production system. There is currently no automated testing. For every new release of the (buggy) document production system itself, or its' (even more buggy) document templates, we face an time-consuming, error-prone, much hated and pretty much useless please see through this pile of documents and report errors if any nightmare of a manual testing process.

Preferably, I would like to add automated tests of both the PDFs' contents and visuals, and humbly ask for the Monks' advise.

PDF content testing

The strategy is to use Xpdf (pdftotext.exe) to convert PDF into text, and then use Test::File::Contents to check the output. This works reasonable good. But alternate solutions or suggestions are welcome.

PDF visuals testing

The strategy is ... non-existant. Any assistance or guidance is highly appreciated.

Happy holidays.

PS. OS is MSWin32 but alternatives are welcome. DS.

C:\test>perl -wle "print $^O"
MSWin32
[download]

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