Acrobat compares two versions of one PDF and reports the differences, with a text-only mode and a document-type setting that changes how it reads the file. It compares that single file against its earlier version; it does not, by Adobe's own description, check that file against a separate schedule, specification, or another discipline's drawing.
What Acrobat's own help page describes
Per Adobe's Compare Files documentation (accessed 2026-09-14), you open Compare Files from the All tools pane, select the two file versions, and Acrobat "analyzes the files and presents a report detailing differences between the documents." A "Compare text only" option ignores graphic-element differences, you can limit the comparison to a page range, and a document-type setting — Autodetect, Reports/Spreadsheets/Magazine Layouts, Presentation Decks, or Scanned Documents — changes how Acrobat reads the content.
That is a general-purpose PDF diff, built for any two-version comparison. Adobe's page does not describe reading a drawing's title block, tracing a tag to a schedule row, or checking a note against a specification section — Acrobat compares the file you give it against the other file you give it, and nothing else.
A note can read differently without a version to compare against
Acrobat's comparison needs two versions of the same file. It has nothing to say about whether that file's own content agrees with a different document — which is where several real coordination questions live.
In Groundbook's published hotel review, the railing-load finding was not a version-to-version change: the architectural notes stated a guard and handrail load below the adopted requirement, and the structural details referred back to those same notes without stating the governing load. A single-file version compare would not surface it, because both documents were current — the disagreement was between two current documents, not between two versions of one.
What to add for a cross-document check
Acrobat's Compare Files is a reasonable way to see what changed in one spec section, one note sheet, or one submittal between two issues. For whether that document still agrees with the drawings, the schedule, or another discipline's sheet, use a review scoped to that relationship: drawings vs. specifications or cross-discipline coordination.
See how six other tools' compare features handle the same question.
If you are comparing drawing sheets rather than a spec
Acrobat's tool works on any PDF, but it was not built to read drawing-specific structure the way a CAD-native compare tool does. If the file you are comparing is a drawing sheet with a title block and revision cloud, AutoCAD's DWG Compare or Bluebeam's Revu tools are built specifically for that.