Quirky tab and indent tool behavior

[Mike Olds]

Hello,

Windows 7 64 bit, TP 8.4.2 64bit

I am not sure what is going on here, but under certain circumstances tabs and the indent buttons do not take the specified number of spaces, but revert to single space indenting.

I have found this happens selecting an indented list:

-bhatta "a crow's meal," i.e. remnants left from a meal thrown out for the crows Ja II 149;
-vaṇṇa "crow-coloured" Name of a king Mhv 2211;
-vassa the cry of a crow Vin II 17;
-sīsa the head of a crow Ja II 351; as adjective: having a crow's head, applied to a fabulous flying horse D II 174; cf. Ja II 129;
-sūra a "crow-hero," applied to a shameless, unconscientious fellow Dhp 244; Dhp-a III 352;
-ssaraka (having a voice) sounding like a crow Vin I 115.

Select just one and the tab key and buttons work ok, select the whole and the problem occurs.

This is happening on both .txt and .htm files.

and in this case:

<div class="floatl">
<p><img src="../../../../resources/backmatter/weights/kahapanas.jpg" width="94" height="271" alt="kahapana" title="kahapana" /></p>
</div>

In another case which I have lost the same thing happened when there was some sort of issue with spacing which frequently happens when picking up a previously published document which has unicode characters. I believe where a combined character was somehow broken. You get three spaces for one; delete that and the three spaces move to the next word to the end of the line.

Not really a problem for me, but I thought I would bring it to the attention of helios.

[Mike Olds]

Does not one else have this problem?

It isn't going away and I miss the convenience.

[ben_josephs]

I can't reproduce the problem you describe with your sample text.

[Mike Olds]

Thanks Ben, I wonder what is going on.

[MudGuard]

What are the settings in your Textpad regarding tabulation?
Especially for the file in question (Alt-Return, Tabulation).

[Mike Olds]

Hello Mudguard,

Thank you for your attention to this.

The settings for this file and overall (default, html, txt) are:

Default tab spacing 3
Indent size 1

the two convert boxes unchecked, no tab stops

EDIT: I just noticed an upgrade to 8.5 which I just installed. The problem remains.

[ben_josephs]

The <tab> key has two meanings:
If nothing is selected or if the selection doesn't include a newline, <tab> enters a tab character.
If the selection contains a newline, <tab> indents the selected lines.

You've told TextPad to indent by 1 space (not 1 tab character), and that's what it does when you select multiple lines.

You should probably set Default tab spacing to the same value as Indent size (in your case, 3).

[Mike Olds]

Hello Ben,

Whew! Your solution seems to have worked.

Since it was working the way I wanted it before, either when I had to reset my preferences when the mouse crashed TP or something changed in a recent upgrade.

I tried reversing the settings, but that did not work.

I suspected it was me, not TP. Though I do not understand the reason for this behavior.

Thanks to both you and Mudguard for this!