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Tab stop

 
Sci-Tech Dictionary: tab stop
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(′tab ′stäp)

(design engineering) A column position to which the printing mechanism of a typewriter or computer printer advances upon receipt of a command.

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Computer Desktop Encyclopedia: tab stop
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A location on a horizontal line that marks the beginning of a column of text. With a monospaced font such as Courier, space characters can be used to line up columns of numbers and names evenly. However, when a proportional font is used such as Arial or Times Roman, the varying widths of letters require the use of preset tab stops for proper alignment. With typewriters, tab stops are mechanical elements that halt the movement of the carriage. In word processing, they are numerical settings maintained by software. See tab.

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Wikipedia: Tab stop
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Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2008)

A tab stop on a typewriter is a location where the carriage movement is halted by mechanical gears. Tab stops are set manually, and pressing the tab key causes the carriage to go to the next tab stop. In text editors on a computer, the same concept is implemented simplistically with automatic, fixed tab stops.

Modern word processors generalize this concept by offering tab stops that have an alignment attribute and cause the text to be automatically aligned at left, at right or center of the tab stop itself. Such tab stops are paragraph-specific properties and can be moved to a different location in any moment, or even removed.

A ruler depicting tab stops in a word processor

Contents

Types of tab stops

A tab stop is a horizontal position which is set for placing and aligning text on a page. There are at least five kinds of tab stops in general usage in word processing.

Left
text extends to the right from the tab stop.
Center
text is centered at the tab stop.
Right
text extends to the left from the tab stop until the tab's space is filled, and then the text extends to the right.
Decimal
text before the decimal point extends to the left, and text after the decimal point extends to the right.
Bar
a vertical line at the specified position on each line in a document.

Elastic tabstops

In 2006 Nick Gravgaard invented elastic tabstops.[1] He also written 2 plugins for Gedit implementing elastic tabstops. Elastic tabstops also implemented in "tabwriter" package of Go programming language.[2]

See also

References

  1. ^ Elastic tabstops.
  2. ^ Package tabwriter
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