IDE versus MSG Box - Field Tabstops

[Geoff Canyon]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 6:02 PM, Richard Gaskin
<ambassador at fourthworld.com>wrote:

> Looks like we've discovered an inconsistency.
>
> Apparently the engine will treat items in the tabstops as column widths if
> one or more of them is smaller than a preceding item, but if each of the
> items is larger than the last then the value you get back will be the same
> you set it to.
>
> If you wrote code expecting the engine to treat incoming values
> consistently, you risk having unexpected column widths.
>
> So we have to ask ourselves:  now that the engine explicitly supports
> relative values via the tabWidths property, is the "sometimes" rule for
> setting tabStops a feature or a bug?
>


It's not a sometimes rule -- it's determinative, and it's a feature.

1. Item 1 of the tabstops is always absolute.
2. If the absolute position of item N of the tabstops > item (N + 1) of the
tabstops, item (N + 1) is taken as relative (added to the absolute position
of item N).
3. After the last tabstop (item F), additional tabstops are added at
intervals of item F - item (F - 1) -- or simply item F if there is only one
item in the list -- until the field runs out of room.

gc