grj@tellab5.tellabs.CHI.IL.US (Gary Jenkins) (09/14/89)
I've been test driving an HP PaintJet for a couple of weeks and have a general question about tabs and whose job it is to expand them. It that a function of the printer, the driver, or is one expected to expand them beforehand with a "expand" or "detab" program? I've been pouring through the PaintJet manual but can't find any references as to how it handles tabs. Is there some reason why you wouldn't want the printer to expand tabs, or at least make it optionable? It seems if the printer always expanded a tab with a fixed tabstop of 8, for example and this was undesirable, you would always have the option of expanding/filtering the tabs beforehand. Thanks, Gary Jenkins
daveb@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) (09/14/89)
In article <1579@tellab5.tellabs.CHI.IL.US> grj@tellab5.UUCP (Gary Jenkins) writes: >I've been test driving an HP PaintJet for a couple of weeks and have a >general question about tabs and whose job it is to expand them. It >that a function of the printer, the driver, or is one expected to >expand them beforehand with a "expand" or "detab" program? I've been >pouring through the PaintJet manual but can't find any references as to how it >handles tabs. > >Is there some reason why you wouldn't want the printer to expand tabs, >or at least make it optionable? It seems if the printer always expanded >a tab with a fixed tabstop of 8, for example and this was undesirable, >you would always have the option of expanding/filtering the tabs beforehand. > Due to the current design of the text side of the printer device expanding tabs is really not possible (the printer device does not track the print head position so it has no idea of how many spaces to expand a tab to). One could use the ConvFunc feature of the printer device to handle all output to the printer (thus tracking th eposition of the print head but this would be a major undbertaking). For some reason all HP printers do NOT have tabs (at least not the LaserJet, DeskJet or ThinkJet series of printers). Generally it is the responsibility of the printer to handle tabs since it always know where the print head is. Most application programs that do want to use tabs (like word processors) track the tabs internal and convert them to spaces which they send to the printer. daveb