[sr #110582] Bug comments should display tab characters conventionally

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #6, sr #110582 (project administration):

[comment #5 comment #5:]
> [comment #4 comment #4:]
> > there is a competing interest for verbatim blocks on whether they should
look right in the browser, or copy correctly for later pasting.
> Copying is supported via the 'Quote' button; using browser facilities will
lose many features like links, lists and so on.

Links, lists, and the like aren't relevant to verbatim blocks, the scope to
which I limited comment #4.  Shell commands, code snippets, and patches -- the
likeliest things to want to be pasted -- are often placed in verbatim blocks.

While the label "Quote" makes the purpose of the button a little unclear to
the uninitiated, anyone who's used the savannah tracker knows Quote as a
button for formulating replies within the tracker.  There is no indication to
the user, nor (I strongly suspect) any widespread expectation, that "Quote" is
required for copy/paste to work correctly, _especially_ in verbatim blocks. 
In fact, the button is particularly ill suited for this, as the quoted
material gets a > prepended to each line, making it far less useful for
copying than the text as displayed in the browser.  I'd be very surprised if
any savannah users regularly hit Quote, edit out all the >'s, then select the
text they want, rather than just highlighting it directly from the displayed
comment.

> Yes; the other options I can see are:
> 
> * leave tabs as is, and the browser will condense them to a single space;

This appears to be what is done outside verbatim blocks.  I'm not sure it's
clearly the worse of the two systems demonstrated in comment #0: in neither
case are the g's vertically aligned, so visually the two systems are just
wrong in different ways.

But solving the visual problem and solving the copy problem may be mutually
exclusive, so, if any changes are to be made, there might need to be a
decision on which is deemed more important.

> * replace every tab with a single non-condensable space.

Agreed, I see no advantage to that approach.


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