Diffing Binary Files
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My partner reviews a lot of P&IDs (piping and instrumentation diagrams) and the adjacent files involved (excel, docx, pdfs, acd/l5x, etc). In his company, these are usually done in Bluebeam.It's really hard to see the diff + keep track of all the revisions resulted by these iterations. They end up storing files like "rev3_final_redlined.pdf". We've been looking for something close to Github to do these reviews, but haven't found one easy enough for folks with no CLI experience to understand and use (happy to check out more tools if you know any).So I built withkord.com to help with revisioning and diffing binary files. Any feedback is welcome.
HN · launched Aug 5, 2026 · 19 upvotes (top 26%) · 0 views
Niche: code diff and technical document viewers · 26 launches, 0 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 26 launches in code diff and technical document viewers →
Could you build this?
Partial While wrapping standard document/image comparison libraries into a web UI is straightforward, high-fidelity visual and structural diffing across diverse proprietary industrial formats (such as STEP, STL, Rockwell PLC L5X, DXF) requires specialized parsing pipelines.
What it would actually take: The stack would combine a modern frontend with a containerized backend running specialized headless parsers and converters (e.g., OpenCASCADE for 3D STEP/STL, LibreOffice/soffice for office docs, custom XML tree diffing for PLC L5X, and raster canvas pixel-diffing for CAD drawings). The core challenge is handling dozens of complex CAD and engineering schemas without breaking layout fidelity or blowing memory limits on large multi-megabyte diagrams.
Discussion
6 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: PDF preview generation fails occasionally, Worker reliability issues
Feature requests: Add caching based on file checksum, Use R2 storage for caching
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 300 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #88 of 301 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 279 days after the earliest competitor.
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- I rebuilt the only parts of my IDE I use, in Rust, over a weekend · hn · 2026-06-22 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- caddiff · github · 2026-10-04 · 51 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- go-binsync · hn · 2026-08-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- binkeep · github · 2026-11-08 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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