<oXygen/> XML Diff & Merge

A complete diff and merge solution is now also available as a separate product. It offers both directory and file comparison, six different diff algorithms and multiple levels of comparison.

In large teams composed either of developers or technical writers, the usage of a shared repository for the source or document files is a must. Often many authors are changing the same file at the same time.

Finding what has been modified in your files and folders can be hard. If your data is changing, you can benefit from accurate identification and processing of changes in your files and folders with <oXygen/> XML Diff 's features for comparing files and comparing directories.

These are powerful and easy to use tools that will do the job fast and thoroughly. With the new possibilities of differencing and merging, it is now easy to manage multiple changes.

Compare Files

The comparison of a pair of files is done by opening them in two editors arranged in a side by side layout. You can edit both the source and the target file. The differences are refreshed when you save the modified documents. The comparison and merging can be performed also on files inside ZIP-based archives.

The inserted sections in the left side are shown in gray, while the ones from the right side are rendered in light blue. The modified sections are red. Using the buttons from the toolbar you can merge the differences from one side to the other.

The differences are presented in a graphical format, the scrolling of the two documents is synchronized so the matches are kept close one another. Guiding areas are painted between the two files to allow to easily locate visually the corresponding differences. An overview ruler helps tracking the changes.

The diff solution includes two XML diff algorithms (XML Accurate - tuned for precise compare and XML Fast - tuned for speed at the expense of some accuracy), one Syntax Aware algorithm that gives very good results on all file types known by <oXygen/> XML Diff and three algorithms that rely on the file structure: line based, word based and character based. Any algorithm can be used to perform differences on request, but <oXygen/> XML Diff offers also an automatic selection, selecting the most appropriate one based on the files' content and size.

The XML diff algorithms are designed to help with the necessities that come with XML document comparison. This means that you can specify if namespaces, prefixes, namespace declarations, processing instructions, comments, CDATA, DOCTYPE, the order of attributes or even text elements should be ignored or not.

All the diff operations do not block the user interface, they present progress information and allow the user to cancel them at any time.

The multiple levels diff support allows you to go into a found difference and see further what is actually modified there. The second level diff has the full merging support that is found also in the first level diff.

Word Level Comparison

When there are modifications between the source and the target file you can see them in detail, at word level, by clicking the "Show modification details at word level" button from the toolbar or from the Operations menu.

Character Level Comparison

You can also see modifications in even deeper detail, at character level, by clicking the "Show modification details at char level" button from the Compare Panel or from the Operations menu.

Both the compare directory and compare file tools are available as separate applications and also integrated in <oXygen/>'s Tools menu.

The diff and merge tool is included in the standalone distribution of the <oXygen/> XML Editor.

Compare Directories

The directory comparison result is presented using a tree view. The directories that contain different files are expanded automatically, so you can focus directly on the differences. You can merge the directories' content using the copy actions or you can examine the content of the different files. The comparison and merging is also performed inside ZIP-based archives (ZIP, JAR, ODF, OOXML).

The tree is showing the file differences using color codes.

When performing a diff between directories/archives the files can be compared by several methods:

• by timestamp - Only the file date and size are compared(fastest method). This is useful when the directories contain a lot of different files.
• by content - The file content is compared using the default diff algorithm. Depending on the selected algorithm the appropriate options will be considered, like ignoring the whitespaces, ignoring the namespace prefixes in case of XML, etc.
• binary comparison - The file content is compared byte with byte. This is faster than the content method but should be used mostly when any difference is of importance.

The file and folder exclude filters help to easily specify the set of files that will be used during the comparison operation. You can choose to see the differences only from the XML files or XSL files for instance. By default, the comparison is made on all file types.

If a file or a folder exists only on one side of the compared directories, the name of the file or folder will be colored blue and marked with an "X". If a file exists in both directories but the content is different, the name of the file will be colored red and marked with a "not-equal" sign.

Compare Images

By double-click on a line containing image files a Compare images dialog will be displayed. The dialog presents the images in the left and right part scaled to fit the view's available area. You can use the contextual menu actions to scale the images at its original size or scale it down to fit in the view's available area. This is mostly useful for visual comparison.

The supported image types are: GIF, JPG / JPEG, PNG, BMP.