Re: Respecting tabs across applications
Re: Respecting tabs across applications
- Subject: Re: Respecting tabs across applications
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:20:56 -0800
On Jan 10, 2012, at 12:49 PM, James Merkel wrote:
> In my application I tab text (Helvetica 12 font) so that things line up in my application window.
> If I copy a text selection out of my app window and then look at the clipboard, the text looks the same as in my window.
> If the clipboard is then pasted into a new TextEdit window or a new TextWrangler window, the tabs don't hold.
> If the clipboard is pasted into the Xcode editor, the tabs do hold.
> How can I make sure that tabs are respected in other applications. (Or what can I do in other applications to make sure that the tabs are respected) ?
I don’t think you can get this to work everywhere. The best you can do is to make sure that the NSAttributedString you write to the pasteboard has tab stops explicitly defined in its NSParagraphStyle. That should take care of apps that handle styled text, e.g. TextEdit. But TextWrangler and Xcode and other plain-text editors define tabs as a specific number of character widths, and that number is fixed as part of the document, so pasting text wouldn’t affect it.
Also, it just occurred to me, are you using multiple consecutive tab characters to try to force things to line up, or are you setting tab stops in the paragraph style? Using multiple tabs is a sure recipe for disaster*, one of those things they warn you not to do in Word Processing 101.
—Jens
* Sorry if that sounds harsh; I’m a typography geek. Don’t get me started about double-spacing after periods…
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