William Chops" Westfield" wrote:
> I'm a big proponent of tabs (it hurts my sense of frugality to use 8
> spaces where one tab would do (yes, even in this day and age when text
> file size is largely irrelevant.))

That's really silly, but it seems you know that.  Put the dead fish down and
use logic instead of superstition.

Let's put this in perspective.  Let's say you've written 1 MLines of code,
and every one of them wasted 7 characters.  That's a whole whopping 7Mb.
Wow.

> What REALLY bugs me is that in this day and age, with all the extra
> "markup language" that lets me tell you that this part of the email is
> 7bit ascii, Helvetica 11 point font, etc, etc, is ... WHY ISN'T THERE
> A MARKUP VARIABLE THAT LETS ME TELL YOU WHERE MY TABSTOPS ARE!?

Then there'd need to be a mechanism for you to describe your tab stops at
your end so that they can be added to the markup.  If you can do that, you
can just as well run a program to convert all the tabs to hard spaces on the
fly before adding it to the email message.  So in a sense you have this
already.

I'm sure there are many programs capable of doing this.  One of them that
can be run in batch mode is my COPYA program, which is freely available in
most releases at http://www.embedinc.com/pic/dload.htm.  Among other things,
it can convert tabs to spaces using a arbitrary set of tab stops that you
specify on the command line.


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