International filenames in Mac/PC folder comparison

[andrew_t]

I have for several years used Beyond Compare to compare folders containing a large number of work-related files with French and German filenames between different Windows machines.

Now I find myself needing to synchronise regularly with a Mac. Most things continue to compare flawlessly, but filenames with special characters (such as umlauts, cedillas, etc.) now show up in both columns of the folder compare, not aligned with one another. I assume this may be due to different encodings used to store the filenames on the Mac and PC, but I do not know for sure.

I am running BC3 (3.3.3 build 14128) on a Windows 7 machine (Region and Language settings are set to use German for non-Unicode programs) and connecting via SMB to a device running Mac OS X 10.7.2.

Is there any way to work around this problem and can something be done to eliminate it in a future update to BC3?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Andrew

[Aaron]

Hello Andrew,

Thanks for the report. PC's are capable of storing unicode file names in a couple of ways: one of which matches the Mac method and another that does not. Technically, while the file name looks the same, it may not be an exact match. Since there is the possibility for it to be a match, BC3 won't align the non-matches. We have a tracker entry open to investigate this and try to improve this behavior. I've added your notes to that entry.