Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!kw1r+ From: kw1r+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kevin Whitley) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Text editor help Message-ID: Date: 5 Oct 88 14:35:23 GMT Organization: Carnegie Mellon Lines: 27 Doug Felt said: >Tabs are tricky. I agree! (Said painfully, with battlescars to show.) I'd like to know what the consensus is, if there is a consensus, about just what a simple tab should mean when buried in the middle of non-left justified text. What does a tab mean in centered text? The solution I came up with for the editor in the cT programming environment (which just got a nice mention in the microBytes section of Byte) was to left justify everything before the last tab in the line and then put the justification (centered, right, full) on the remainder of the line. Needless to say this has some unwanted effects when lines with tabs wrap. But I was driven by the syntax of the language my editor was for (which is command tab arguments... making it very desirable to put the command, which is before the tabs, all the way over to the left). I am also curious about machine-independent file formats which save style information. Our programming environment supports styled text over various systems so we are forced to use some lowest common denominator (for instance, everything must be 7-bit ascii and in the data fork). Anybody have any experience on this? Kevin Whitley cT development kw1r@andrew.cmu.edu