Text Compare Alignment Settings

Session > Session Settings > Alignment

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The Alignment tab settings control the algorithm for aligning lines 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 Alternate method aligns the files using a common LCS (Longest Common Subsequence) algorithm.  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.

Select Unaligned to compare files without aligning lines based on their content.

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

Note  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.