word wrap / horizontal scrolling

**Aaron** · 11-Apr-2011, 11:07 AM

Hello,

Thanks for the suggestion. Word wrap is something that is on our Customer Wishlist. Our wishlist is not currently scheduled development, but a place our developers go to for ideas for future features or enhancements.

One feature that I think may help is our Next Difference command. Launch the Text Compare, and go to the Tools menu -> Customize Commands. Here, search for Next Diff. We have a few variations. The default on the Toolbar is Next Difference Section, but you can assign a Hotkey for Next Difference, which will hop to the exact spot of the difference. Does this help?

Please let us know if you have any questions.

**HjP** · 11-Apr-2011, 01:18 PM

Hi,

thanks for your answer. Assigning a Hotkey for Next Difference is not exactly what I was looking for. Word wrapping would allow for an at-first-glance overview of differences ant their context in text documents. Since a "characters per line limit" functions is already implemented it seems to me that it shouldn't be a big deal to implement a button that toggles the value of this function. But perhaps I'm missing something..
What do you think about my second suggestion (horizontal scrolling with Shift+mouse wheel)?
Thanks,
HjP

**chrisjj** · 12-Apr-2011, 05:27 AM

Originally posted by HjP

Since a "characters per line limit" functions is already implemented it seems to me that it shouldn't be a big deal to implement a button that toggles the value of this function. But perhaps I'm missing something..

"characters per line limit" causes line splits that affect the comparison result, so cannot be used to simply split the lines for better viewing.

**Aaron** · 12-Apr-2011, 09:20 AM

Chrisjj is correct in that the characters per line limit affects the comparison (example: extra text is at the front of a line, and the limit is hit splitting it, text on different lines would then not compare.)

Word Wrap is on our Customer Wishlist with several customer requests, notes, and scenarios. It is something we are aware of but we are currently in the middle of several other large projects and it would require more investigation before we could tackle it. If there are any example files you would like to pass on, please feel free to post them here or email them to us at [email protected]. If you email us, please include a link back to this forum post for reference.

**Michael Bulgrien** · 12-Apr-2011, 07:03 PM

May I suggest that a shorter-term solution prior to a full-fledged implementation of word wrap might be to create a "Wrapped Details" pane to swap out with the regular "Text Details" pane that takes just the current pair of lines and displays them (with difference coloring in place) wrapped to match the width of the pane.

**HjP** · 12-Apr-2011, 07:14 PM

Thanks for your detailed reply regarding my suggestion to enable word wrapping with "characters per line limit".
Besides this suggestion, I proposed to enable horizontal scrolling by holding down the shift key while using the mouse wheel. This would alleviate the pain to mess around with the scrollbar, in particular when using a mouse with hyperscroll (logitech).

**Aaron** · 13-Apr-2011, 11:27 AM

Thanks for the suggestion, HjP. I'll add your scroll wheel suggestion to the Customer Wishlist.

**Aaron** · 13-Apr-2011, 11:28 AM

Thanks for the suggestion, Michael. This is one of the methods we are considering.

**brianleejackson** · 11-May-2011, 06:11 PM

Word Wrapping

I 2nd the need for GUI word wrapping... That would be amazing! The text compare report does the job, but not as nice and creates extra work. Thanks!

**davenovak** · 12-Jun-2012, 10:07 AM

Just today I was looking for a word wrap option in Text Compare. I too think this would make a nice addition.

**mrzurkon** · 20-Jun-2012, 11:05 AM

Count this as another request. Beyond Compare is great and we use it a lot, but this is the one BIG issue that is causing us grief.

Thanks!

**eitheta** · 10-Aug-2012, 11:38 AM

Just another vote for wrapping long lines. BC3 is really sweet for comparing versions of PDFs. Less good for Word docs, because of the long lines.

**dlantrip** · 17-Oct-2012, 04:08 PM

I tried to find a way of doing this today, wrapping long text lines, in BC3. I couldn't find a way of doing this either. I have bragged incessantly to my co-workers about how great this software is, yet this is something that would seem simple to do, and there's no way to do it. The company I'm working at as a subcontractor is looking for a better tool than CompareIt, and this could seal the deal on convincing them to take the plunge and get BC3 for everyone. There's no way to do it in CompareIt, and now I can't say to them that BC3 does this with aplomb! Is there any way to know whether or not this is going to make it into a future release given that this post was started 5 years ago, and it still hasn't been important enough to seriously consider?

**Aaron** · 18-Oct-2012, 10:10 AM

This post was started a bit over a year ago, but Word Wrapping has been on our Wishlist much longer than that. It is something we definitely consider, but is a significantly large project and we have limited resources to delegate.

Just to be sure, you are aware of our Character per Line Limit and the wrapping offered in HTML reports, correct? In general, BC3 is capable of comparing most long lines if you need to increase the Character per Line limit, it just requires a lot of horizontal scrolling when within the main Text Compare view. The HTML reports offer some basic wrapped abilities, since the browser itself can help wrap the text.

word wrap / horizontal scrolling

word wrap / horizontal scrolling

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment