[MlMt] Tab stops and previews of multiple selected messages

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On 2 May 2019, at 5:07, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
>
> The exception would be if the sender uses tabs in plain text to align 
> something *not* at the beginning of a line. In this case, it would 
> make sense to enforce a particular tab size by converting it into 
> spaces. Then it might also make sense to generate HTML which enforces 
> the use of a fixed-width font when the message is displayed.
>
This isn't  scenario that makes much sense unless both the sender and 
the recipient are using
fixed-width fonts, I suspect. And trying to figure out the semantics for 
conversion to a <TABLE>
are difficult. Suppose, for example, that the user types two tabs in a 
row. Is that an empty entry,
or is it visually aligning things? And how would you decide where the 
table entries start? Seeing
where the left edge of the bounding box for the first character after a 
tab is? Suppose that the
table is actually numeric entries, where I tab to the table cell, but 
then space so that the numbers
are right-justified. Do you want to interpret that, too?

My conclusion is that it would be a nice feature to have but not nearly 
worth your pain, as long
as there's some way to include an HTML table. (I don't know Markdown 
nearly well enough to
guess—I've never really learned it; I find it just as easy to type 
actual HTML…) I suspect that
converting to spaces is the easy, sane way, perhaps with some 
auto-select to a fixed-width font.


         --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb