What is the purpose of TAB key?

Answer 1

In modern applications, the Tab key rarely has the effect of inserting the Tab character. In word processor applications, the Tab key typically moves the cursor to the next tab stop. In most other graphical applications, the Tab key will shift the focus to the next control or widget.

Several tab characters are included as ASCII control characters, used for text alignment. The most known and common tab is a horizontal tab (HT), which in ASCII has the decimal character code of 9, and may be referred to as control+I or ^I. A vertical tab (VT) also exists and has ASCII decimal character code 11 (control+K or ^K). The EBCDIC code for HT is 5. The VT is 11 or hex 0B, the same as in ASCII. The horizontal tab is usually generated by the Tab key on a standard keyboard.

Originally, printer mechanisms used mechanical tab stops to indicate where the tabs went. This was done horizontally with movable metal prongs in a row, and vertically with a loop of mylar or other tape the length of a page with holes punched in it to indicate the tab stops. Initially these were manually set up to match the preprinted forms that were loaded into the printer. Later, the intention was to have the machine be pre-programmed, by using other control characters to set and clear the stops: ISO 6429 includes the codes 136 (Horizontal Tabulation Set), 137 (Horizontal Tabulation with Justification) and 138 (Vertical Tabulation Set).

In practice, settable tab stops were rather quickly replaced with fixed tab stops, de facto standardized at every multiple of 8 characters horizontally, and every 6 lines vertically (typically one inch vertically). A printing program could easily send the necessary spaces or line feeds to move to any position wanted on a form, and this was far more reliable than the modal and non-standard methods of setting tab stops. Tab characters simply became a form of data compression.

It is unclear why the 8-character horizontal tab size was chosen, since 5 characters, a half inch in a typical printer at that time, was much more popular as a paragraph indentation. The number 8 may have been chosen to match early Fortran conventions, where the statement text started after the line number and continuation character. It may have been chosen as the smallest size that would fit numbers typically printed in a table.A Unix program, expand expands a tab to a number of spaces and unexpand does the opposite.

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Answer 2

The TAB key allows you to move between fields, or between files, just as the old typewriter TAB would space to the next column of a table in a document.

TAB is an abbreviation of the word "tabulator", or table input.

Answer 3

a tab stop reffers to a preset text position .The tab feature in ms word enables the user to change the default distance coverd by the tab key for the presentation of colomunar data in ms word

Answer 4

Many people use the Tab key to indent paragraphs.

Answer 5

Takes where you are typing to to the next tab or a big space.

Answer 6

The tab key is used to indent a sentence.

Answer 7

desu