For my personal use, the only drawback of mat2 is that for PDFs it turns pages into PNGs (https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/-/blob/master/libmat2/pdf.py), so you lose the OCR layer/searchable text from the original file. Since ExifTool changes to PDF metadata are reversible if you don't linearize them (https://exiftool.org/TagNames/PDF.html), now I just use this script to safely clean and keep the output file searchable: https://gist.github.com/sneakers-the-rat/172e8679b824a3871decd262ed3f59c6.
I guess you could compare the output files from mat2 and ExifTool using the fc or diff commands, to find out what's the difference
fc
diff
For my personal use, the only drawback of mat2 is that for PDFs it turns pages into PNGs (https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/-/blob/master/libmat2/pdf.py), so you lose the OCR layer/searchable text from the original file. Since ExifTool changes to PDF metadata are reversible if you don't linearize them (https://exiftool.org/TagNames/PDF.html), now I just use this script to safely clean and keep the output file searchable: https://gist.github.com/sneakers-the-rat/172e8679b824a3871decd262ed3f59c6.
I guess you could compare the output files from mat2 and ExifTool using the
fcordiffcommands, to find out what's the difference