Files Comparison Preferences

To configure the Files Comparison options, and go to Diff > Files Comparison.

This preferences page allows you to configure the following options:

Enable file comparison in Author mode

If selected, a visual Author mode is available in the file comparison tool. It displays the files in a visual mode similar to the Author editing mode in Oxygen XML Editor/Author. This visual mode is available when both compared files are detected as being XML and from a recognized document type.

Ignore Whitespaces (Not applicable for the visual Author comparison mode)

If selected, before performing the comparison, the application normalizes the content (collapses any sequence of whitespace characters into a single space) and trims its leading and trailing whitespaces.

Note:

If the Ignore Whitespaces checkbox is selected, comparing the a b sequence with

a
                b

, Oxygen XML finds no differences, because after normalization, all whitespaces from the first sequence are collapsed into a single space character. However, when comparing a b with ab (no whitespace between a and b), Oxygen XML signals a difference.

Two-Way Diff section

Default algorithm

The default algorithm used for comparing two files. The following options are available:

Three-Way Diff section

Default algorithm

The default algorithm used for performing a three-way comparison. The following options are available:

XML Diff section

Ignore (Not applicable for the visual Author comparison mode): Allows you to specify the types of XML nodes that will be ignored in the file comparison for the XML Fast and XML Accurate algorithms. You can choose to ignore Processing Instructions, Comments, CDATA, DOCTYPE, Text, Namespaces, Prefixes, Namespace declarations, and Attribute order.
Ignore nodes by XPath (Not applicable for the visual Author comparison mode): If selected, you can enter an XPath expressionXPath expression to ignore certain nodes from the comparison. It will be processed as XPath version 2.0. The XPath expression specified in this option is used as the default ignore instructions only when the application is started. If you enter an XPath expression in the similar option on the Diff Files toolbar, that expression will be used instead.
Merge adjacent differences (Not applicable for the visual Author comparison mode): If selected, the application considers two adjacent differences as one when the differences are painted in the side-by-side editors. If not selected, every difference is represented separately.
Mark end tags as different for modified elements (Not applicable for the visual Author comparison mode): If selected, end tags of modified elements are also presented as differences. Otherwise, only the start tags are presented as differences.
Ignore expansion state for empty elements (Not applicable for the visual Author comparison mode): If selected, empty elements in both expansion states are considered matched (that is <element/> and <element></element> are considered equal).

Note:

The File Comparison preferences are also accessible through the Directory Compare Tool and are taken into account when directory comparisons are invoked.