VBA for comparing the flat pattern of a dxf to its pdf

[Anonymous]

Hello! I am still relatively new to VBA but I have an interesting issue that I'm looking for a code snippet to solve.

My company creates pdfs and dxfs of every fabbed part (we don't have in house fabrication, we job out all parts to vendors). The issue is that sometimes the dxf will be updated and a new pdf is not created. The vendor then will make according to what they see in the pdf and not the dxf, or vice versa. Either way, the end result is confusion or a wrong part.

What is needed is some code that will loop through all pdf's and dxf's in a certain directory and compare the flat pattern lines in the dxf against the flat pattern lines in the pdf  and check to see that they overlap (99.9% overlap or some similar parameter would be helpful but not totally needed). This is where I'm not sure that this is even possible because I know that Inventor can store information about the lines associated with a certain view but I'm unsure if Adobe can handle lines this way....

Not sure if this has been tried. I googled it several ways and didn't see anything like this attempted before.

I'm using Inventor 2017 and Adobe Acrobat Reader 2019.

[garrettfulghum]

Could you instead force the PDF creation when you save the part or assembly?

What Im assuming is happening is that the user updates the part, exports it to dxf, and just forgets to re-update the idw and export it?

If so you could have it when the user saves it as a dxf it will update the idw and then re-export it as a pdf. However if the changes are more than just a simple parameter change, some dims will require the user to fix them.

Comparing the two automatically is possible but I would imagine very difficult. BlueBeam pdf viewer allows you to overlay pdfs/images etc but the user still has to go in and check for changes.