[MlMt] Tab stops and previews of multiple selected messages

[Randall Gellens]

On 2 May 2019, at 17:13, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:

> 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.

I have been unable to figure out any way to include an HTML table.  But, 
I am not sure how fancy such a feature would need to be.  Simply sending 
as HTML with a fixed-width font and converting the tabs to spaces would 
cover the vast majority of cases, I suspect.

--Randall