Yes, that would help (the show special character). Just tried it again but... argh... once you get used to something you can't unlearn it easily. You don't want to know how long I stayed with the cursor keys on the numeric pad I was finally forced to kick that habit when I got a keyboard without numlock (temporary experiment from Logitech at the time, I guess).
LOL, me too, to me it was a Laptop without extra Num-Block
Before that people could see that i was on the computer because the Num was lit, ....
Did you ever test that multi-columned text with different tab-settings?? I'm not sure at what number you've got it but try setting it at something small (2 or 4) and reload your project. All your aligned text could get messed up because you expected it to align at a specific tab-setting. If you can force the setting to a specific number ("<<now tab=8>>") in the source-code you might be save but there is no such setting.
This (8 tab-space): (there is a tab before the |)
1234567890
|123456 |test
|12 |test
would become this (4 tab space):
1234567890
|123456 |test
|12 |test
So... yeah... really bad.
But that's only if someone else want to read your code, and if that someone changes the default-setting from 8 to something.
In my opinion, changing the default, you have to know what you are doing.
But even when it's 4 or 6 spaces, It's better readable than without tabs.
1234567890
|123456|test
|12|test
Tab settings in source-code editors are not made for formatting layout. (They are only for indentation !!)
The fact that they depend on a variable number of spaces a user can set determines that. If source-code editors always used the same tab setting or had an option to set tabs like in rtf they could be used for this, but they haven't.
What people used to do, and what the intention of the original developer was always differs.
The most (normal) people (colleagues) ,i see, using a wordprocessor, use (Paragraph-)Break at the end of line, where they just could type on.
So I highly doubt, using habits as a meassuring device. (People are people, you know ....)
Correct... always to the same position... and again... that is not how a tab in a source-code editor works... So, don't use them like that. The layout will be messed up for somebody with different tab-settings.
Take Notepad++,Ultraedit or delphi there it works. (meaning You could set the font to a non-monospaced, and tab puts the cursor to the next tab-stop-position.
(BTW: setting the font to a non-monospaced in lazarus looks really ugly ...)
In the past I made a rtf2html converter. You could try converting traditional tabs to html-tables but that's a real pain. I finally ended up using div-elements to place the following text at a specific location (according to the tab).
<div style="position: absolute; left: 200px">text</div>
So every tab I encountered would be translated to a "close-div" and an "open-div"-element. (Lines started and ended with a div too)
Using html-tables, oh yeah, thats'a pain ...
Using <DIV> maybe the only way... [/quote]