Comparing and Merging Documents

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 Developer '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 Developer provides a simple means of performing file and folder comparisons. You can see the differences in your files and folders and 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.

The comparison tool can also 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 the following command:

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. One of the arguments can miss 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 can specify one or two parameters, because Diff Files perform only two-way comparing.