External tools - only for folder comparison?

[avonwyss]

I tried to find more information about the external tools (in the manual, on the web). Unfortunately, it is not very throughly documented and for my use-case, the external tool does not seem to do what I expected it to do.

I configured a diff for Word documents in the External Tools. Now, when calling DiffMerge on two word documents (from Vault for instance), I expected DiffMerge to recognize that the files were different (binary compare) and invoke the external diff tool. However, it tried to load the files itself, of course failing miserably to compare them. Did I miss something? Because if the external tools only apply to folders compared using DiffMerge, this makes the external tools functionality almost useless for people who also keep non-text files in Vault (PDF, Office documents, images, you name it) which can be compared using 3rd-party tools.

Vault apparently only allows to call one diff or merge tool for all extensions, and having DiffMerge act as "host" or switch for 3rd-Party tools would be a very nice way to deal with this (last but not least because of the DiffMerge explorer integration, which could be used for any file type configured in the external tools then).

Edit: Seems that the extensions were not in the format I expected. After changing *.doc to doc, it seems to work as expected. Maybe this could be documented better or the user could be hinted about the extension format.

[Beth]

Edit: Seems that the extensions were not in the format I expected. After changing *.doc to doc, it seems to work as expected. Maybe this could be documented better or the user could be hinted about the extension format.

Thank you for the update. I will document your request regarding Diff/Merge documentation.

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