Total Commander

I sometimes use the Compare tool as a file viewer - it allows me to show two files side by side and scroll the contents up and down synchronously.

However, the Compare tool supports only four encodings - ANSI plus three Unicode encodings. If one of the files is encoded in a code page other than the current system code page, it would be impossible to show that file correctly in the Compare tool, since there is no means to select the correct code page.

The Lister has an Encoding menu that includes some twenty code pages, it allows the user to select the proper code page for the file being viewed. It would be greatly helpful if these encodings are also supported in the Compare tool.

Add WinMerge as Compare tool and you have the full list of Encodings available.

yong wrote: 2022-07-27, 16:04 UTC If one of the files is encoded in a code page other than the current system code page(...)

...change script of font used for comparison.

Usher wrote: 2022-07-27, 17:59 UTC ...change script of font used for comparison.

Unfortunately this doesn't work, because this changes the encoding of both panels.

What I want is to be able to set the encoding of each panel individually, the same way as I can set the encoding of each Lister window, and set the encodings that the Lister provides, other than those included in the font intrinsically.

yong wrote: 2022-08-05, 03:18 UTC

Usher wrote: 2022-07-27, 17:59 UTC ...change script of font used for comparison.

Unfortunately this doesn't work, because this changes the encoding of both panels.

What I want is to be able to set the encoding of each panel individually, the same way as I can set the encoding of each Lister window, and set the encodings that the Lister provides, other than those included in the font intrinsically.

Such an option is not provided by any compare tool I know.
I guess the reason is that not many people have files with a content to compare which are stored in different encodings.

yong wrote: 2022-08-05, 03:18 UTC Unfortunately this doesn't work, because this changes the encoding of both panels.

I'm afraid I can't help you if you have problems with Chinese encodings.

I can only recommend to convert files with known encoding to Unicode. I use command line converters for files in Polish and Russian as I have many old files saved in ISO-8859-xx, DOS/OEM or even more exotic encodings. For single cases you can make conversion just changing encoding in Lister, than copy-and-pasting text to Notepad and saving it in Unicode.

Try Beyond Compare

You can change the encoding individually for each file.

I think it's the best comparison tool available.

In most cases it makes no sense to use different encodings for the left and right file, because characters available e.g. in Western ANSI are not all available in Cyrillic ANSI etc. But you can change the encoding for both and then still compare an ANSI file with a Unicode file.