To reach this options page, select Options > Options... > Text Comparisons
The controls on this page enable you to set options that apply to all file comparisons performed by the file and folder comparison windows.
Ignore differences in whitespace at the start of lines
Choose this option to ignore whitespace (spaces, tabs, carriage returns and line endings) at the start of lines when comparing files.
Ignore differences in whitespace at the end of lines
Choose this option to ignore whitespace (spaces, tabs, carriage returns and line endings) at the end of lines when comparing files.
Treat consecutive whitespace characters as a single whitespace character
Check this option to ignore differences caused by the introduction of extra whitespace characters following an existing whitespace character.
Ignore all differences in whitespace
Choose this option to ignore all whitespace (spaces, tabs, carriage returns and line endings) within lines when comparing files.
Ignore differences in character case
Select this option to make Merge ignore the case of characters within lines. This is particularly useful if you are comparing source code for case-insensitive programming languages.
Ignore differences in line ending characters (CR and LF)
Select this option to make Merge ignore differences between Windows-style line endings (cr lf), unix line endings (lf) and Macintosh line endings (cr) when comparing files.
Default character encoding
Choose the language or codepage to use as the default character encoding for file and folder comparisons. The two adjacent radio buttons enable you to show either languages or installed codepages in this list. If you select a language in this list, the ANSI codepage for that language is used as the default character encoding.
Languages
Check this option if you want to use a language's ANSI codepage. The contents of the adjacent list will change to show codepages ordered by language and country.
Codepages
Check this option if you want to choose a specific codepage number to use. The contents of the adjacent list will change to show codepages ordered by codepage number.
Auto-detect character encoding from file content
Check this option to make Merge look within files to determine the character encoding that should be used for loading and saving. If the encoding cannot be determined, the default character encoding specified above will be used.
Merge currently looks for Unicode byte-order markers at the start of files, xml and html encoding directives, and optionally for #pragma codepage directives within resource files.
Auto-detect character encoding in Windows Resource files
Check this option to make Merge look for and use #pragma code_page directives within Windows Resource (.rc) files. These directives are normally used to denote codepage changes within a file, potentially enabling a single file to contain text encoded in a variety of different codepages (e.g. a mixture of
Japanese, Chinese, Western European, etc). If you use Resource files in such a way that the #pragma code_page directives should not be used during loading and saving, perhaps because you prefer to encode the entire file in UCS-2 or
UTF-8, then you should uncheck this option. If you do, make sure that you use the correct encoding to load and save the file
by setting the other Merge options appropriately.
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