Text Compare Settings:  Alignment

Session > Session Settings >  Alignment

The Alignment tab settings control the algorithm for aligning lines left and right in the comparison.

The Standard method aligns the files by comparing successively smaller sections of each file.  Parts of the alignment can be shown before the entire comparison is finished.

Skew tolerance represents how far the algorithm will look for matches.  When comparing files with many or large inserts, a larger tolerance can improve the alignment.

The Use closeness matching option attempts to align the remaining mismatched lines based on their similarity.

The Alternative method aligns the files using a standard LCS approach.  This can give better matches in certain cases, such as large inserts or when the files contain a lot of repeating text.  Since files are compared all at once, larger file scans take much longer than the standard method, and the files are not displayed until the comparison is complete.  It does not support similarity comparisons, so mismatches will be grouped in blocks.

Mark the Never align differences checkbox to show mismatched lines as blocks of added and deleted text rather than changed text.

NoteNote Regardless of these settings, the alignment algorithm will sometimes produce undesirable results.  To manually align two lines, right-click one line and select Align With and then click the second line.

A merge conflict is...  pro_only

In a Text Merge session, the Session Settings dialog includes options for defining the scope of conflicts.  A conflict occurs when the same section of text has changes on both left and right sides.

Select Only different change lines to limit conflicts to where each line has changes on both sides.  Select Left change and right change separated by lines to specify the maximum number of lines between changes that should be considered conflicts.  This way, left and right changes that are close to each other can be flagged for review along with direct conflicts.