On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 02:24 AM, Art Kocsis wrote:
How does one insert tabs or specify a fixed point font on a Wiki page?
All of the eleven available fonts are proportional and trying to insert tabs
just changes fields.
In essence, I want to display a two column table and left align the second column.
This is tricky on every forum on every forum site I've ever been on--not just Groups.io or their Wiki.
As Shal noted, the best solution (if you have the skill) is to use an HTML table. Here is the second-best solution.
Intuitively, you would think that you could simply switch the font to a monospaced (fixed-pitch) font like Courier or Lucida Console and use spaces to line things up. That works in word processors like Word. Unfortunately, the HTML standard defines "whitespace" as spaces, tabs, newlines (CR, LF, or CRLF). It states that any string of whitespace shall be condensed to a single character of whitespace when rendering. So even if you carefully save a table that's padded with spaces for alignment, and it's delivered to the viewer that way, his browser betrays you and collapses it to a single space.
So the only option is to use some non-whitespace character for some of the padding, never using two whitespace symbols in sequence. Here's a bogus table, where I'm trying a few different padding options with Courier.
Column A? ?Column B
aa _______ bbbbbaaaa ..... bbbaaaaa _ _ _bbbbbb
a _ _ _ _ _bbbb
aa . . . . bbbbb
I think I like the solid underscores and dots better than the dashed versions, but all of these seem to work.
Larry
Laurence Marks