Comparison, in the open
Collate answers one question — do these two files match, and where exactly do they differ? — and answers it with measured facts, never a verdict. Open source, with managed hosting for teams who'd rather not run it themselves.
Print With Synergy
Collate is built by Print With Synergy, a studio focused on prepress automation and developer tooling for the print and packaging industry. These tools grew out of real plant workflows: store the assets once, extract the facts, measure the differences, preflight against the standards, and review with prepress-grade tooling.
Each engine owns exactly one job. codex extracts single-file facts; collate measures two-file difference facts; lint owns the rules, tolerances, and pass/fail verdicts; lens owns display. Collate ships no tolerance constant and no overall-match roll-up on purpose — the compare logic was lifted out of codex precisely to keep the verdict out of the objective layer. It states the numbers; lint judges them.
Collate owns no raster primitives of its own: it reuses codex-pdf for plate decode, the Ghostscript separation render, ink normalization, and the Pantone catalogue. codex stays the extraction layer; collate is comparison built on top — and, like codex-pdf, lint-pdf, lens-pdf, and assay-pdf, it's open source under AGPL-3.0.
The hosted service adds multi-tenant auth, metered billing, quotas, and access control — managed hosting around the same open engine.
Two ways to run it
Self-host the open source on your own Docker host, or run it managed on the hosted platform.