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 Author 's features for comparing files and 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.
<oXygen/> XML Author provides a simple means of performing file and folder comparisons. You can see the differences in your files and folders and also you can merge the changes.
There are two levels on which the comparison can be done, namely comparing directories or comparing individual files. These two operations are available from the Tools menu.
Also the comparison tool can be started using command line arguments. In the installation
folder there are 2 executable shells (diffFiles.bat
and
diffDirs.bat
on Windows, diffFiles.sh
and
diffDirs.sh
on Unix/Linux, diffFilesMac.sh
and
diffDirsMac.sh
on Mac OS X). You can give one or two command line
arguments to each of these shells.
For example, to start the comparison between 2 directories on Windows use:
diffDirs.bat "c:\Program Files" "c:\ant"
Note that if there are spaces in the path names, the paths need to be surrounded by quotes. Also one argument can be missing in which case the second directory will be chosen manually by the user.
The same goes for the files diff utility as well.
If you run the diff tool from the command line (diffFiles.exe
or
diffFiles.bat
on Windows, diffFiles.sh
on Linux,
diffFilesMac.sh
on Mac OS X), you must specify one or two parameters,
because Diff Files perform only two-way comparing.
The directories comparison result is presented as a tree of files and directories.The directories that contain different files are expanded automatically, so you can focus directly on the differences. You can merge the directories' contents using the copy actions or you can compare and merge the different files by double-clicking on them.
The directory comparison user interface is comprised of the following components:
This menu contains the functions available for directories comparison:
→ : Performs the comparison of the directories.
→ : Performs the comparison of the files.
→ : Copies the selected file or folder to the corresponding directory from the right (if there is no file/folder in the left part the right file/folder will be deleted)
→ : Copies the selected file or folder to the corresponding directory from the left (if there is no file/folder in the right part the left file/folder will be deleted)
Ctrl+W) : Closes the Compare directories window.
→ (The available functions are presented in the Operations menu.
For the Algorithm and Diff Options buttons look below at File Comparison / Compare Toolbar
File filters are available; you can choose to see the differences only for XML files, or XSL files for instance.
To open the directories you want to compare, select a folder from each "Browse for local file" button. <oXygen/> XML Author keeps track of the folders you are currently working with and those you opened in this window. You can see and select them from the two combo-boxes.
If you want to compare two archives' content you can select the archives from the "Browse for archive file" button.
![]() | Tip |
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By default <oXygen/> XML Author treats supported archives as directories and the comparison is also done with the files inside them. You can disable this behaviour by unchecking the "Look in archives" checkbox from the Diff preferences page. |
The directory comparison result is presented using a tree of files and directories.
For the files and folders from the compared directories you can see their name, size and their modification date.
If a file or a folder exists only in one of the compared directories, the name of the file or folder will be 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 red and marked with a "not-equal" sign. <oXygen/> XML Author offers an useful option here: you can double-click the line marked with the "not-equal" sign and a new "File Content Comparison" Window will be opened, showing the differences between the two files.
By double-click on a line containing two different images 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.
The supported image types are: GIF, JPG / JPEG, PNG, BMP.