what file types does kdiff3-qt compare?

Question

I've tried to compare .odt and .doc files in kdiff3-qt and all I get is gobbledygook. The only files I've been able to compare are .html. Does anybody know the file types that kdifff3-qt will compare? And if it's very limited, is there a better comparison tool (for Xubuntu 10:13) that I can get?

Answer 1

all generic file diff tools compare files as a sequence of bytes or text, this means if you open a file (e.g .doc) in a text editor and do not understand what it contains, then the diff of such files in such a tool will also not be understandable

generic diff tool work best with text file formats (.txt, .html, .sh, .py, etc). binary formats are unusually application specific and cannot be handled by such a generic diff tool

if you want to compare the contents of .odt or .doc files, converter them first to .txt text files, and compare the text