Two PDF files, identical except for possibly different cover pages — how to remove duplicates?

Question

I have a bunch of PDF files which are articles downloaded from various Journal websites. The problem is, some of these PDF files are duplicates of one another. However, if I run a basic duplicate file finder, they won't show up, because journals have the (somewhat annoying) habit of putting a cover page in the PDF before the actual article. In other words, if I have two copies of article "X" by author Y, one downloaded from site A and the other site B, they aren't exact duplicates because one has cover page from A and the other has (different) cover page from B. So my question is:

Is it possible to check if two PDF files are duplicates, ignoring the first page?

Of course, this doesn't solve all my problems, since some journal websites don't put a cover page! So the best possible question would be:

Is it possible to check if two PDF files are duplicates, where one (or both) might have a cover page?

I would appreciate any helpful comments.

Thanks, Steve

Answer 1

DiffPDF can visually compare PDFs (I haven't tried it myself), also available as a portable app.

Even if you removed the cover page from all the articles with something like PDFTK, I very much doubt that the PDFs will be the same in a binary compare.

Maybe another way would be to rename each file to something unique in the articles, an article number perhaps, or a date including time? Then you could do a filename compare.