Default Compare Options

Use this tab to set the default options for comparing files. You can change these options also from Compare Files dialog (see Comparing Files for details) using the Advanced button.

Options

Ignores: All white space (only when comparing text files)

When checked, the file comparator ignores all horizontal and vertical white space characters (space, tab, end of line). You can imagine that it removes all white space characters before it starts any other actions.

Ignores: Changes in the amount of white space (only when comparing text files)

When checked, the file comparator ignores all changes in horizontal and vertical white space characters (space, tab, end of line). You can imagine that it replaces every sequence of white space characters by a single space character before it starts any other actions.

Ignores: Case (only when comparing text files)

When checked, the file comparator ignores case (upper and lower case characters are equivalent).

Files type: Autodetect, Text, or Binary

If you choose autodetect, both files will be tested if they are text files. If yes, they will be compared as text files. Otherwise they will be compared as binary files. If you don't want the files types to be autodetected, select if the plugin should compare them as text or as binary files.

Encoding of text files

You can let File Comparator autodetect the encoding (or code page) of the compared files when comparing as text files. Or you can choose one of several encodings and conversions.
There are 2 groups of available options:

• ASCII-8: Conversions between several various encodings (code pages) of one of 3 groups of languages: Central European, Cyrillic and Western European. Only 1 group is available at a time. It is the same group as in the Internal Viewer of Altap Salamander. Another group can be chosen in the Language page in Configuration of Altap Salamander as Code page conversion tables.
  When a conversion is selected, the entire file is first converted in memory and then compared with the other file.
  Choosing a conversion is suitable when comparing files in different encodings. Otherwise usually no conversion is needed. For better (correct) display, it is advisable to convert both files either to CP12xx or ASCII codepage.
• Unicode: Various Unicode encodings

Line ends (only when comparing text files)

Choose what types of line ends should be recognized in the first and second file.

Combine diacritic marks to precomposed characters

Many accented characters can be represented in several ways in Unicode. Either as a pair (or triple) of characters (the unaccented version of the character plus the accent(s), this is called decomposed or composite character) or as a single character (precomposed character). While on Windows the precomposed form is the usual one, files originating on other operating systems can use the decomposed form. Both forms are equivalent in terms of rendering, but stored differently.
When this option is checked, File Comparator on Unicode input files attempts to convert decomposed characters to precomposed ones to achieve so called Normalization Form C of Unicode. The Form C allows comparison of the content rather than the way the text is stored.
NOTE: Not every decomposed pair or triple has its precomposed equivalent.
NOTE: This function is available only on systems that contain a system library called normaliz.dll. It is a part of Windows Vista and newer OS versions, but is also part of MSIE 7 or Windows Media Player 11 when installed on Windows XP or 2003. It can also be installed separately as Microsoft Internationalized Domain Names (idndlpackage.EXE) from Microsoft downloads.