Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!unisoft!hoptoad!tim From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Text editor help Message-ID: <5480@hoptoad.uucp> Date: 29 Sep 88 06:43:48 GMT References: <2476@rti.UUCP> Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco Lines: 24 Nope, TextEdit doesn't handle tabs. I have no idea why they would add font and style changes in the new version and still not handle tabs. For an ugly workaround, you can tabify and detabify when inserting and extracting text, which is a humongous pain in the sacral region and does not do what the user would like, which is seeing tabs as single characters, and preserving tabs when leading text changes. Think about managing end of line comments in a C or Pascal program in a tabify/detabify editor -- every time the active part of the line changed length, you would lose end of line comments' alignment. There MAY be another hack you could use, but I haven't gotten the nerve to try it yet. Use the QuickDraw text bottlenecks to special case tabs and fill in the appropriate width for the current insertion point. This sounds like a nightmare, but if it worked it would give you what you want. (Or me what I want, anyway.) Everyone agrees that TextEdit should handle tabs, except Apple. Unfortunately, theirs is the only opinion that counts. -- Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim "Do what you wanna, do what you will; Just don't mess up your neighbor's thrill. And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip." - Frank Zappa, "You Are What You Is"