Frequently Asked Questions

Please see the Compatibility and System Requirements for this information.

Please see Feature Summary and Differences Between Editions for this information.

Araxis does not currently offer network (floating) licences or site licences for Merge, although we are aware of strong demand and will consider offering network licences in the future.

Please note that quantity discounts are available for the Professional Edition of Merge.

Please see the End-User Licence Agreement for Araxis Merge Software for full terms and conditions.

A licence must be purchased for each machine where the product is to be used. The only exception to this is that the primary user of a computer for which a licence has been purchased may make a second copy for his or her exclusive use on a second computer. This means that you can buy a single Merge licence and then use it simultaneously on both a Windows PC and a Mac, provided you are the only person using that licence.

Please see the End-User Licence Agreement for Araxis Merge Software for full terms and conditions.

Yes. See also ‘How many licences do I need to buy?’

Please see Understanding Araxis Merge Serial Numbers, Support Expiry and Upgrade/Support Entitlement Renewal and How to Buy Merge.

Yes. Please see the Merge for Windows page on the Araxis website.

Unfortunately, no. However, Merge does seem to run under Wine  on Linux. We would be grateful for reports of any problems running Merge under Wine.

Another possibility is running Merge and Windows under Linux using a virtual machine environment such as VMware Workstation .

Araxis does not believe that Merge is affected by this change. Merge simply examines the timestamps of files as returned by the host operating system. Consequently, as long as the host operating system is behaving correctly with regard to the new DST dates, Merge should treat timestamps correctly.

Please note that the folder comparison functionality within Merge also supports optional timestamp tolerance, and the ability to make allowance for time-zone differences. See Method for more information.

Follow the steps to delete crash logs and remove preferences described on the Uninstalling Merge page.

Please see Upgrading Merge or Installing Newer Builds for information about this.

Click on the Re-Register... button in the Araxis Merge > About Araxis Merge dialog to re-enter registration information.

Please see Troubleshooting Installation for solutions to most installation problems.

The Araxis Merge > About Araxis Merge dialog displays the version and build number information.

Please see Uninstalling Merge.

To make your Merge serial number apply to all users of the your Mac, without having to enter it for every single user:

• Set up and register Merge normally for a single user. Quit Merge.
• Logged on as that user, open the Keychain Access application from the Application/Utilities folder.
• Locate the Araxis Merge application password entry in the login keychain.
• Drag this entry to the System keychain. (You might need to enter your password to modify the System keychain.)

Merge comes with filters for opening and comparing the text content of several popular file formats, including Word documents. See Comparing Text Files (or Typed/Pasted Text) for more details.

Alternatively, you can copy and paste any text from other applications into a Merge file comparison window. So, simply open a new two-way file comparison, then copy the text from one document (in Microsoft Word, press Cmd+A to select the entire document, followed by Cmd+C to copy it to the clipboard) and paste it into the left file pane (click in the pane, then press Cmd+V to paste). Then, repeat, pasting the text of the second document revision that you wish to compare into the right file pane. The differences between the documents will then be shown. This is an effective way to compare, for example, different drafts of a contract being edited with Microsoft Word.

A further possibility for some application formats not supported by Merge (e.g. Microsoft PowerPoint .pptx files) is to open them in their native applications and save them to a different, supported format (e.g. .ppt).

Merge for Mac OS X is able to compare PDF files in two ways: either by extracting the text content from them and performing a text comparison, or by rendering the PDF files as a series of images (one per page) and comparing those as an image comparison. For text-based PDFs, the former is probably more appropriate.

To have Merge compare PDFs using a text comparison:

• Open the Preferences window and go to the File Comparisons > File Types page.
• Check the row for a Text Comparison with the *.pdf pattern.
• Uncheck the row for Image Comparison with the uti:public.image;uti:com.adobe.pdf pattern.
• For text comparisons involving documents, you might also find it helpful to configure an appropriate serifed font (e.g. Georgia) from the Preferences window File Comparisons > Fonts/Colours page, and also to turn on word-wrapping.

To have Merge compare PDFs as images using an image comparison:

• Open the Preferences window and go to the File Comparisons > File Types page.
• Uncheck the row for a Text Comparison with the *.pdf pattern.
• Check the row for Image Comparison with the uti:public.image;uti:com.adobe.pdf pattern.

Please see Integrating with Source Control, Configuration Management and Other Applications for the latest information.

If you are the developer of a vc or scm system, Araxis would be pleased to assist you integrate Merge with your product. Please contact Araxis for further information.

Please see Three-Way File Comparisons and Automatic File Merging for this information.

It is sometimes useful to be able to review all the changes you have made before saving. If you have the Professional Edition of Merge, you can do this for two-way comparisons using the three-way comparison capability.

Open the file that you will be merging from into the left pane and the file that you will be merging into in both the middle and right panes. Whenever something is merged from the left file into the middle one, or if any other change is made to the middle file, the right pane shows exactly what the changes were. This enables you to review all the merges and changes you have made before saving.

Use the Visibility Filters... command on the View menu to choose exactly which files and folders you wish to see.

By default, pressing Tab on its own moves you between the various panes in Merge file comparison windows. Use Option+Tab if you want to insert a tab character into the file you are editing.

You can change this behaviour on the Text Comparisons > Editing page of the Merge Preferences dialog.

Merge provides the ability to create reports from file and folder comparisons. Please see Creating a File Comparison Report and Creating a Folder Comparison Report for more information. Alternatively, print a comparison and Save as PDF... to create a PDF.

• The small Previous Change and Next Change buttons below the scroll bars can be used to jump to the previous or next change.
• Click on the and toolbar buttons to move to the previous or next change.
• There are also several keyboard shortcuts that can be used.

A conflict occurs in a three-way merging scenario where a two later revisions of the common ancestor file have been modified in different ways at the same location relative to the common ancestor file. The Automatic File Merging page shows an example of a merging conflict. A change is simply a difference between two files. Linking lines show how the lines in one file are changed with respect to the other file.

Merge provides the ability to compress blocks of unchanged lines so that just a few lines for context are displayed. Please see the Display help topic for more details.

Changes occurring within numbered columns, or column ranges, can be ignored by using the controls in the Lines preferences page. To omit fields or sequences of characters that don’t always appear at the same absolute position within the line, create a regular expression using the controls in the Expressions preferences page. When entering the expression, choose the Ignore sequences of characters that match the expression option to ignore changes within the matching characters. Please see the Edit Expression window’s help topic for more details.

This command isn’t a toggle command. When you use it, Merge will look through the comparison results list and hide any folders that don’t contain visible files. If you use the command before the folder comparison has completed, folders could be hidden even if they eventually contain visible files when the comparison finishes. Wait until the comparison has completed before using the command.

Unlike Merge for Windows, Merge for Mac OS X does not come with an FTP plugin. However, there are two free projects, MacFusion  and MacFUSE , that (when both installed) together enable FTP servers to be mounted as network drives. Merge can then use them like any other network volume (/Volumes/<ftpsitename>).

Merge generally compares files very quickly. However, for those situations where comparisons take more time, applying the following suggestions can improve matters.

• Disable any unnecessary regular expressions (Araxis Merge > Preferences… > Text Comparisons > Expressions).
• Uncheck the Ignore characters in the following column numbers/ranges option (Araxis Merge > Preferences… > Text Comparisons > Lines).
• Choose Don’t show changes within lines or Show simplified inline changes (Araxis Merge > Preferences… > Text Comparisons > Display).

Merge is optimized to compare even large folder hierarchies very quickly. However, folder comparison performance is highly dependent upon several Merge settings. For the fastest folder comparisons:

• Uncheck the Use filter programs in folder comparisons option (Araxis Merge > Preferences… > File Comparisons > File Types).
• Uncheck the Gather line count statistics for inserted and removed files option (Araxis Merge > Preferences… > Folder Comparisons > Scan).
• Uncheck the Scan contents of folders excluded by filters and Scan contents of files excluded by filters options (Araxis Merge > Preferences… > Folder Comparisons > Scan).
• Choose the File timestamps and sizes only comparison method (Araxis Merge > Preferences… > Folder Comparisons > Method).
• Check the Compare byte-by-byte for files larger than # KB option (Araxis Merge > Preferences… > Folder Comparisons > Method), and consider reducing the file size threshold for byte-by-byte comparison from the default 512 KB.

It is likely that Mac OS X, or some other application on your system, has intercepted the key for its own purposes. You can view (and modify) the list of keyboard shortcuts used by Mac OS X on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse item in System Preferences.

You should choose a font in the File Comparisons > Fonts and Colours preferences page that is able to display all the characters for the character encoding that you are using.

Please see Understanding Araxis Merge Serial Numbers, Support Expiry and Upgrade/Support Entitlement Renewal for information about your serial number.

By default, the 64-bit version of Merge will be used on 64-bit capable systems. Unfortunately, not all printer driver suppliers currently supply 64-bit versions of their printer drivers. You might therefore see a message ‘The bundle XXXX could not be loaded because it does not contain a version for the current architecture’ for some settings pages in the Print dialog.

If a new printer driver is available, try using that. Alternatively, you can run the 32-bit version of Merge by right-clicking on the Araxis Merge application icon, choosing Get Info, and then checking the Open in 32 Bit Mode checkbox.

Follow the steps to delete crash logs and remove preferences described on the Uninstalling Merge page. If that doesn’t solve the problem, try completely uninstalling Merge and re-installing. If you still encounter difficulties, please contact Araxis for assistance.

If you run a web site, we encourage you to link to the Araxis web site. You don’t need to ask permission first, but we would appreciate a quick email to sales@araxis.com to tell us about your link.

To avoid any danger of broken links, it is best if you link to http://www.araxis.com/ or http://www.araxis.com/merge_mac/.