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Some languages (particularly IBM ones) give a special significance to characters appearing in a particular column. It would be nice to be able to highlight text that falls into a particular column number (e.g. 72).

I second this suggestion: when writing input files for some finite element softwares (MSC.Nastran for example) you have to tabulate your data in 8 or 16 characters columns. And sometimes those very pieces of data are 8 or 16 characters long so it's a bit hard to see where each of them end or begin. This feature could be really nice to avoid some nasty mistakes...

Certainly the ability to syntax highlight by column range -- e.g. colour text between columns 10 and 20 blue, between 70 and 90 in red -- is one that would have been useful to me a while ago when looking at CSV file that was too big for Excel, et al.

To be useful I'd suggest the options:

single character position (9)
range of character positions (9..12)
before a position (..11)
after a position (11..)

It would be nice to also include options to select by "column" in a more general way: e.g. define a column as text between | characters, and then define text in column 2 as being red. (of course, | is an example - you could use , or " " or tab or ... )

Has this been implemented? I'm looking for an easy way to see if I've got my text in the right columns for Nastran decks. It's all about keeping within columns of 8 characters.

It would be interesting to see a way to change the background color of certain columns, maybe so they alternate between grey and white, for instance. This may be hard on the eyes, but it'd be very useful for keeping everything in the right spot.

Another thing that could be cool would be, as rivimey suggested, a setting in the syntax highlighting scheme to color text in, say, columns 9-16 one color, columns 17-24 another, etc., and then still color my keywords, which are all in columns 1-8, according to the .syn file I have set up.

I cannot believe that this enhancement submission is serious.
Textpad Developers: Please do not waste any time on this obscurity until other enhancement requests which have widespread utility in software development, are implemented first.