The bundled Rational Synergy graphical compare and merge tool is supported for source files that contain Unicode characters. For more information, see Compare and merge support for file encodings.
A wide range of encodings are supported for source files. Information about UTF-16 and UTF-32 is described in this topic. Additionally, see the restrictions in Keyword Expansion. Define files in encodings incompatible with ASCII (such as EBCDIC) as binary types.
For general information about encodings for Rational Synergy files and attributes, see File encodings.
Ensure that the editors used with Rational Synergy support the encodings used. Some editors allow the encoding to be selected when opening or saving files; others assume that files are in the default system encoding.
Some files in some encodings (and most files in UTF-16 or UTF-32 encodings) treat source files as binary even if they have a subtype of ASCII. This means that the Rational Synergy type of the object might be ASCII or a subtype of ASCII, but internally, Rational Synergy treats the file as binary. A file is treated as binary due to the appearance of null bytes, Control-Z, or too many other non-printable characters. UTF-16 or UTF-32 files might contain many null bytes, which have the following implications for files that are treated as binary.