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[asciitable.com...]
Try out the reaction tests on the site, pretty cool coding.
Enjoy =)
Terry
BTW - I wish to thank drdoc and others for leading me to Firebird. Love it. It's the most trouble-free browser I've ever used, ever.
Shadows Papa
I can't think of a case where I would use tabs instead, but that may be a failure of imagination.
Firebird. Love it. It's the most trouble-free browser I've ever used, ever.
Except that the password manager stinks and is almost making me go back to Mozilla, but I digress...
Tom
Presuming the poster wants to "force" a tab-stop, there is no way to in HTML - inserting tabs (' ' the whitespace tab and 	 the character set entity are the same character) will just display like spaces, because in HTML all whitespace is equal unless the text is preformatted. Check it out:
<html>
<body>
<p>This is a tab: 	tab	tab	</p>
<pre>
tab	tab	 tab
</pre>
</body>
</html>
I can't really think of any way of inserting "real" tabs in HTML, without resorting to Javascript for the layout. If you were after actual tab-stops as you might get in a wordprocessor, you're actually talking about a right margin that is some modulo of the length of the block, and I don't think CSS can handle that. However, I also can't think of a reason you might want it :)
It would be quite interesting to save a doc from a wordprocessing in HTML format and see how it handles real tabstops. I've tried Abiword, and tabs get completely lost.
It would be quite interesting to save a doc from a wordprocessing in HTML format and see how it handles real tabstops.
Hmm.... interesting question.
I put in "[tab]This starts with a tab".
WordPerfect 2000:
Puts in five plain spaces.
Word 2000:
About 50 lines of code. If you open it up in Word, the tab will be preserved, but I can't imagine you would want to put the page on the web. In it's web version, there are only several spaces and severl styles which are Word-specific and set within HTML comments.
Star Office (starting with a text doc):
Puts in five plain spaces.
Tom
right margin that is some modulo of the length of the block
Aren't tabs usually calculated in ems? Chicago has nothing to say about the size of indents and tabs, but I don't think it's usually related to the length of the block, but rather the size of the font, no?
Tom
123456781234567812345678 [(ruler ;)]
fish red
dog brown
Those columns are separated by tab-stops. The whitespace between the columns is a tab; so tell me, how long is a tab?
Well, how long is a piece of string. You actually take the length of the word/block before, divide by the maximum length of your tab, and the remainder is the tab size to use. What value you use for "length" is up to you: number of characters maybe (this would be your ems value), or the actual pixel-length of the word (this is what wordprocessors tend to use, since their fonts don't tend to be monospaced).
And if you think you can make the above tab example in HTML using tables, think of this example:
123456781234567812345678
fish red
dog brown
orangutan orange
Tab-stops don't line up unless the words are roughly the same length. They just put the next word at some position further right. You wouldn't be able to emulate the above with tables. However, as I intimated in my posts, you probably wouldn't want to emulate this behaviour anyway :)
robert
Got it. I was thinking that the tab stop would be every X em, which may be, but as you explain that doesn't help you at all in terms of doing layout. You need to know the distance between the previous word and the next to know what the offset is to get you to that tab.
Paragraph indention is easy because the offset is always the same.
It's curious that Chicago has lots on indention in indexes, but very little for text and no mention that I could find of tabbing.
Tom
Tom
