The Conversion page in the File Formats dialog defines how files should be loaded and saved.
Text Compare sessions can compare plain text files, such as programming source files, directly. To compare files with structured or proprietary formats, it may be necessary to first extract the plain text content from the file. For example, Microsoft Word documents are binary files, but Beyond Compare can extract and compare their textual content. Beyond Compare can highlight differences in words and sentences but cannot identify differences in formatting or embedded images.
1.Choose Tools | File Formats 
(Beyond Compare | File Formats on macOS) to open the File Formats dialog.
2.Select a text format.
3.Click the Conversion page.
4.Choose a Conversion method. When using External program methods, you will need to specify a conversion program with the appropriate path and command-line switches in the Loading edit box. In order to support filenames with extended characters, make sure to choose the appropriate filename encoding (Unicode or ANSI). The following variables will be replaced with the indicated information:
%s source file
%t target file
%o original file
Conversion programs are only considered successful if they return a zero exit code and generate a non-empty file.
If you have a conversion program you want to use before saving, you can clear the Prevent editing checkbox and in the Saving edit specify that conversion program's path and command-line switches. The above variables apply.
5.The Encoding of most text files can be detected automatically, but you can specify a specific code page to use.
6.Select the Ctrl+Z indicates end of file checkbox if your file type uses the hex value 1A as an EOF marker.
7.The characters per line limit setting will break long lines at the indicated length. Those artificial line breaks are removed when saving an edited file.
8.Select the Trim trailing whitespace and Convert leading spaces to tabs checkboxes if you want to perform those edits before saving files.
