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]

--
No matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now, remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them. [1]

In reply to PDF content and visuals testing best practices by andreas1234567

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.