Advanced Options

Use this dialog to set options for comparing files. You can choose whether to use these options only for the current comparison or set them as defaults. You can also preset these options on the Default Compare Options tab in the Configuration dialog.

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 it removes all white space characters before starting 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 it replaces every sequence of white space characters with a single space character before starting 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 to determine whether they are text files. If so, they will be compared as text files; otherwise, they will be compared as binary files. If you do not want the file types to be autodetected, select whether the plugin should compare them as text or binary files.

Encoding of text files

You can let File Comparator automatically detect the encoding (or code page) of the compared files when comparing text files, or you can choose from several encodings and conversions.
There are two groups of available options:

ASCII-8: Conversions between various encodings (code pages) in one of 3 groups of languages: Central European, Cyrillic, and Western European. Only 1 group is available at a time. This is the same group used in the Internal Viewer of Sally. You can select a different group in the Language page in Configuration of Sally under Code page conversion tables.
When a conversion is selected, the entire file is first converted in memory, then compared with the other file.
Choosing a conversion is useful when comparing files with different encodings. Otherwise, usually no conversion is needed. For better (or correct) display, it is advisable to convert both files to either a CP12xx or ASCII code page.
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 a decomposed or composite character), or as a single character (precomposed character). While on Windows the precomposed form is typical, files from other operating systems may use the decomposed form. Both forms are equivalent for rendering but are stored differently.
When this option is checked, File Comparator attempts to convert decomposed characters to precomposed ones in Unicode input files to achieve the so-called Normalization Form C of Unicode. Form C allows comparison of content rather than how the text is stored.
NOTE: Not every decomposed pair or triple has a precomposed equivalent.
NOTE: This function is available only on systems that contain the system library normaliz.dll. This library is part of Windows Vista and later OS versions, and is also included in MSIE 7 and 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.

Use these settings in future comparisons

When checked, the options will be saved as defaults and used for all future comparisons. Otherwise, these options are used only for the current comparison.