[PLUG] Emacs: Uneven Tab Spacing
Dale Snell
ddsnell at frontier.com
Wed Apr 22 17:22:42 UTC 2015
On Wed, 22 Apr 2015 07:29:20 -0700 (PDT), in message
alpine.LNX.2.11.1504220722140.26983 at localhost, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Apr 2015, Rich Shepard wrote:
>
> >> What happens if you type C-q TAB instead of TAB by itself?
> > Haven't tried that. Will later today.
>
> Nothing. If I type C q then q is entered in the line. If I type C-q
> nothing happens.
Nani? C-q is <control-q>, and is bound to the Emacs command
quoted-insert, which inserts the next character literally. So the
sequence C-q TAB should insert a literal ASCII <tab> character at
point.
> >> Finally, are your tab stops set to something you're expecting? You
> >> can issue "M-x ruler-mode" to see the tab stop locations.
> > Good point. I'll check this, too.
>
> At 3.2 inches I see a red '#' and at 8.0 inches I see a red
> 'paragraph' symbol (a backwards P with double vertical strokes). Then
> there's the yellow '!' showing the position of the point along the
> ruler.
The ruler is divided into characters, not inches. (At least it is
here. If you're using a proportionally-spaced font, then I don't
know how it's divided.) The "#" marks the "comment column". The
"¶" (pilcrow) marks the fill-column, the column at which Emacs
wraps the line. BTW, if you click on the ruler with C-MOUSE-2, it
turns the tab indicator, "T", off and on. (The point marker is a
broken vertical bar; the exclamation points mark every 5
characters.)
> On a test file of received spam I get inconsistent spacing:
>
> From HomeWarranty at by.hybragen.com Tue Apr 21 12:09:50 2015
>
> That's with a single [Tab] between strings. It's not as acute as this
> line:
>
> Received: from by.hybragen.com (by.hybragen.com [192.208.185.92])
(Claws-Mail's word wrapping messed your lines up; I think I've
fixed it, but maybe not.)
In the first line, visible tabs stops are at 8, 40, 48, 56, 64 and
80. This is consistent with tab stops set to every eight
characters. In the second line, visible tab stops are at 24 and
64, again, consistent with eight-character tab stops. (The gap
between "Received: " and "from" is filled with spaces.)
Evidently, whatever is generating these lines is using tabs to
separate the various fields. When I copied the lines into an
Emacs buffer, they looked fairly reasonable. However, on my
system, I have tab-width set to 4 characters. To see your lines
the way they showed up in your e-mail, I had to change the setting
to 8 characters. (The DEC-VT100-standard setting.) So yes, if
you have lines with a lot of TABs in them, you are going to see
lines extending beyond 80 columns. Maybe more than 160 columns.
Note that I did not see more than one TAB in a row.
Since I'm still not sure what you're doing, I don't have much to
recommend you do. If you don't have any control over the lines
you're receiving (and I gather you don't), then I don't know that
there's much you can do. (I'm assuming [*HAH!*] that you want or
need to keep the text in the same form that it came to you.)
Anyway, I hope this was of some help.
--Dale
--
"The attitude of 'Oh, you want it should work? That costs extra!'
is the biggest security hole in computer software today."
-- Unknown, paraphrased (anybody know the actual source?)
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