Re: tab characters in the source code

[demery]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009, Patrick McCarty <address@hidden> said:

>> Is there an easy way to address this? 

use a programming editor.  tabs were invented at a time when fixed-width
was the norm, high-speed printers and teletypes had no other way to put
ink on paper.  back then, the tab stops were 8 chars apart.

Programmers today more often use stops at 4 characters, however todays
fonts thro a monkey wrench into all this with proportional fonts.

Programming editors are available for both mac and windoze systems, if you
dont have one available try a normal text processor and use a mono-spaced
font.

As to LY not accepting tabs, thats a shame, tabs should be treated as
white space, along with <bel> <nul> <lf> <VT> and other now-disused
characters from the days of teletypes which sometimes find their way into
ascii files from odd unix and dos systems; this is done in the postscript
language.  Except perhaps in lyrics, where they might well be used to
demarcate syllables.

> I don't know what editor you're using, but with Vim you can search for
> `\t' to find them.

many editors will have search and replace, some even have grep-like
capabilitys.

> I've struggled with this in the past until I realized that a normal
> tab is equivalent to *eight* spaces.

not exactly, each tab is one to 8 spaces, enough to get up to the next tab
stop; unless the editor that created the document was set so that tabs are
4 spaces of course, in which case it is 1-4 spaces.
-- 
Dana Emery