We are pleased to announce that we've released ExamDiff Pro 17. You can download ExamDiff Pro 17 from the ExamDiff Pro Downloads page. Here's what's new in ExamDiff Pro 17: Improved text rendering and styling ExamDiff Pro 17 introduces a new text rendering engine based on DirectWrite, Microsoft's modern text rendering API, replacing the older GDI-based text. Using DirectWrite enables crisper-looking text (thanks to sub-pixel rendering and hardware-accelerated advanced anti-aliasing techniques), as well as higher-quality rendering of non-Western character sets, emojis, ligatures, and characters with complex diacritics. For more information, see our blog entry about text rendering and styling improvements. Reengineered Office document support (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX) for much more robust and precise conversion to text One feature we're particularly excited about in ExamDiff Pro 17 is richer support for displaying and comparing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. For this version, we've completely rewritten the plugin that processes Office files (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx, etc), to pull out as much structure and rich content from Office files as possible for comparison. For more information, see our blog entry about improved Office document support. Enhanced update checking, including in-app update support ExamDiff Pro 17 adds the ability to download and install updates without leaving the application. In this version, when you click Help | Check for Updates, if there are any updates available, a new Update Available dialog will open, where you can see all the features that have been added in between your current version of ExamDiff Pro and the newest available version and choose to download and install the updates directly. For more information, see our blog entry about in-app update support. Ability to compare ANSI files with non-default code pages, such as Shift-JIS ExamDiff Pro 17 introduces the ability to manually specify the codepage (encoding) used for non-Unicode text files. This version allows users to override the codepage used for non-Unicode files, with the ability to choose any of the Windows codepages. For more information, see our blog entry about comparing ANSI files with non-default code pages. Other Additions In ExamDiff Pro 17 Syntax highlighting, previously limited to colors, now supports font effects: bold, italic, underline, and strike-through Added VHDL document type with full scope bar support and syntax highlighting Option to use Shift + Mouse Wheel to horizontally scroll the focused pane instead of scrolling differences Better behavior of "Copy adjacent ignored lines when replacing diff blocks" Significantly better text rendering performance when syntax highlighting is enabled Improved positioning of dialogs in multi-monitor setups Status bar now shows the number of selected characters and the Unicode code point of the character at the cursor Cleaner "Explorer Menu" submenu, with duplicate entries from other shell extensions removed Pane splitters in text comparison and merge now resize panes live while dragging when Windows' "Show window contents while dragging" setting is on, instead of only after releasing the mouse Multiple bug fixes You can find more details about ExamDiff Pro 17, as well as a download link, here, and the complete list of changes here.

We are pleased to announce a public beta program for ExamDiff Pro 17. You can download ExamDiff Pro 17 Beta from the ExamDiff Pro Downloads page. The upgrade is free for all users who purchased ExamDiff Pro less than 12 months before this release (or more, depending on the number of maintenance years purchased). Here's what's new in ExamDiff Pro 17: Improved text rendering and styling ExamDiff Pro 17 introduces a new text rendering engine based on DirectWrite, Microsoft's modern text rendering API, replacing the older GDI-based text. Using DirectWrite enables crisper-looking text (thanks to sub-pixel rendering and hardware-accelerated advanced anti-aliasing techniques), as well as higher-quality rendering of non-Western character sets, emojis, ligatures, and characters with complex diacritics. For more information, see our blog entry about text rendering and styling improvements. Reengineered Office document support (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX) for much more robust and precise conversion to text One feature we're particularly excited about in ExamDiff Pro 17 is richer support for displaying and comparing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. For this version, we've completely rewritten the plugin that processes Office files (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx, etc), to pull out as much structure and rich content from Office files as possible for comparison. For more information, see our blog entry about improved Office document support. Enhanced update checking, including in-app update support ExamDiff Pro 17 adds the ability to download and install updates without leaving the application. In this version, when you click Help | Check for Updates, if there are any updates available, a new Update Available dialog will open, where you can see all the features that have been added in between your current version of ExamDiff Pro and the newest available version and choose to download and install the updates directly. For more information, see our blog entry about in-app update support. Ability to compare ANSI files with non-default code pages, such as Shift-JIS ExamDiff Pro 17 introduces the ability to manually specify the codepage (encoding) used for non-Unicode text files. This version allows users to override the codepage used for non-Unicode files, with the ability to choose any of the Windows codepages. For more information, see our blog entry about comparing ANSI files with non-default code pages. Other Additions In ExamDiff Pro 17 Syntax highlighting, previously limited to colors, now supports font effects: bold, italic, underline, and strike-through Added VHDL document type with full scope bar support and syntax highlighting Better behavior of "Copy adjacent ignored lines when replacing diff blocks" Multiple bug fixes Try ExamDiff Pro 17 Beta today and let us know your feedback!

One feature we're particularly excited about in ExamDiff Pro 17 is richer support for displaying and comparing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

In ExamDiff Pro 16 and below, the way that Office documents get handled is by pulling out all text from them wherever possible, but the structure and rich content within the documents gets lost. This makes it hard to compare, for example, Word documents or PowerPoint presentations that rely heavily on structured content like lists and tables, or Excel spreadsheets where the positioning of fields is important.

For ExamDiff Pro 17, we've completely rewritten the plugin that processes Office XML files (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx, etc), to pull out as much structure and rich content from Office files as possible for comparison. This functionality will differ slightly between different document types, so let me go through then one at a time.

When comparing Word documents, ExamDiff Pro will now, in addition to the document text itself, display:

• table content, rendering it visually as a table in text form, with a box around each cell
• list content, rendering it neatly including nested lists
• metadata about hyperlink path and image content
• comments
• footnotes and endnotes
• metadata about rich content like diagrams, Word Art, and equations
• and many more other fields, when the /all option is specified (more on that below)

Below you can see a side-by-side of how a given Word document is rendered in ExamDiff Pro 16 vs ExamDiff Pro 17. As you can see, table content is now nicely presented, and metadata fields like hyperlink paths, image paths, comments, and footnotes are now displayed:

PowerPoint presentations are handled similarly to Word documents, with the addition of metadata about slides themselves (slide numbering and titles). This makes it easy to see at a glance which content corresponds to which slide in a presentation, as you can see in the side-by-side comparison below:

When comparing Excel spreadsheets, worksheet names are now displayed to make it clearer which rows belong to which worksheets, and cell formatting is now respected (so, for example, currency cells will now render currency amounts correctly and date cells will now render dates as they're meant to be shown). You can see how this makes it easier to view Excel files in the side-by-side comparison below:

As with prior versions of ExamDiff Pro, Office document handling is controlled by the built-in OOXML to Text plug-in, which can be configured in Options | Plug-ins:

Two command-line options for OOXML2Txt that are useful to know about are /all and /wrap:

• /all enables a bunch more document metadata handling that is normally disabled. When you enable /all, you'll see things like headers and footers, bookmarks, information about document properties, and lots of other fields for Office documents in ExamDiff Pro. We think that keeping this off would be more useful by default to most users, but try enabling it if, say, it's important for your use case to be able to compare things like header/footer content between documents.
• /wrap:N sets the word wrap character limit for the text output produced. (So for example, /wrap:80 forces 80-character lines - this is the default.) Note that wrapping is handled separately for each cell in a table. So if your word wrap limit is set to 80, this means that every cell in a table can be up to 80 characters wide (this caveat is important because otherwise it would be tough to render tables at all once they have more than a few columns). Also, list depth doesn't count towards the word wrap limit, so if you have a very nested list, each line will still be allowed its full length even if it's very indented due to list nesting.

ExamDiff Pro 17 will feature some significant improvements to how text files are displayed.

Switch to DirectWrite Text Rendering Engine

ExamDiff Pro 17 will introduce a new text rendering engine based on DirectWrite, Microsoft's modern text rendering API, replacing the older GDI-based text. (Note that DirectWrite is only available starting in Windows 7, so if you are one of our few users who happens to still running Vista or below, ExamDiff Pro will retain its old GDI-based text rendering engine in your case.)

Using DirectWrite will enable crisper-looking text (thanks to sub-pixel rendering and hardware-accelerated advanced anti-aliasing techniques), as well as higher-quality rendering of non-Western character sets, emojis, ligatures, and characters with complex diacritics. In the side-by-side example below, you can see how a variety of text styles end up looking nicer in ExamDiff Pro 17 versus previous version:

And if you happen to deal with emojis a lot, you'll certainly see a bit difference, as ExamDiff Pro 17 supports proper rendering of color and size for emojis:

Support for Text Styling in Syntax Highlighting

Also on the topic of text rendering, ExamDiff Pro 17 will introduce the ability to specify text styles (bold, italic, underline, and/or strike-through) for individual syntax types in syntax highlighting:

This can make it easier to visually navigate through source code files in ExamDiff Pro. For example, we can render keywords in bold and strings in underline:

ExamDiff Pro 17 will introduce the ability to manually specify the codepage (encoding) used for non-Unicode text files.

By default, when ExamDiff Pro loads an 8-bit-encoded (non-Unicode) text file, it interprets the file based on the system codepage, as determined by your default language setting in Windows. This usually does the right thing, but causes problems if you routinely have to deal with non-Unicode text files in different encodings. For example, here's what it looks like if you try to load some files in the Shift-JIS encoding (popular for Japanese scripts) while your Windows language is set to "English (U.S.)":

As you can see, there is some gibberish in the Added blocks here, where we would expect to see Japanese text.

ExamDiff Pro 17 introduces a solution to this issue: in Options under Text Comparison | Advanced, you now have the ability to override the codepage used for non-Unicode files, with the ability to choose any of the Windows codepages.

So we can set the Custom codepage to "932 (ANSI/OEM - Japanese Shift-JIS)":

And after re-comparing, the Japanese text in these files appears properly: