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Welcome to Compare It!
About Compare It!
Installing and Removing Compare It!
What's New in This release?
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Using Compare It!
Comparing files
Merging Files
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Comparison
Advanced Comparison
Editor
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Print Options: Margins
Print Options: Advanced
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Keyboard Shortcuts, Toolbar Buttons, Menu Commands
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Adding Shortcuts to External Applications
Adaptive comparison
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Configuration File
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Custom Syntax Files
Defining Column Ranges
Enhanced Open File
File lists support
Folders comparison
Ignore Difference
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Partial matching
Profiles
Result File Support
Separate
Unicode Support
Using Compare It! with File Manager
Using fixed/alternative font
Using Regular Expressions
Using RegExps substrings
Word files comparison
Excel files comparison
Other file formats support
Zip File Support
General Information
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Future Releases
Other Products
Frequently Asked Questions
Updates and Support
Using fixed/alternative font File manager Regular Expressions

Compare It! now let's you work with two different font types. You can quickly toggle font usage in editor, or automatically choose specific font depending on file type.

Recommended uses of two-fonts approach

  • Automatically using fixed font for tabular data (*.xls, *.csv), and proportional font for all others.
  • You can configure alternative font to be of smaller size, and quickly manually switch it, when you need to see more data at once.

What is "fixed" font anyway?


There are two big groups of fonts in Windows - fixed and proportional fonts. In a fixed font, such as Courier, every character occupies the same amount of horizontal space, like typewritten characters. In a proportional font, such as Arial or Times New Roman, character width varies. As result fixed fonts are clear and generally easier to read, they are also invaluable when viewing columns data. On other hand, proportional fonts are more compact and let you see more in given screen width.
Fixed font example:
String width depends only
on characters count, not on content.
123456
ABCDEF
UVWXYZ
With proportional fonts
you can easily see the difference:

123456
ABCDEF
UVWXYZ

I already use fixed font. Why do I need the second one?


Probably you don't. We have added additional fixed font support to ensure all users can normally see differences in tabular data. But even if you current font is fixed (and default font is!), you can still get some value from it. Just make it smaller and quickly switch to alternative font when you need to see more.

To define main and alternative fonts


You can change both fonts in Editor's options in menu Options > Options > Editor.

To quickly toggle between fonts


You can switch which font to use by invoking menu command View > Use fixed font. Default shortcut is Ctrl + F12.

To associate fixed font with specific file types


In File filters you can now set an option to always use fixed font for chosen file types.
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