I have always wondered why Calamus has it's own way of putting TAB-marks. All other programs that I know of puts the TAB-mark at the beginnining of the word and then the you choose the alignment in the ruler. In Calamus it works the oposite way. The two different ways causes me to spend a lot of time replacing TAB-marks after I have imported text from other sources such as plain text, RTF-files etecetera.

So I have been wondering about this and have come to the conclusion that there must be a VERY GOOD AND WELL THOUGHT OUT reason for Calamus to do it in it's own way and not like the rest. The problem is that I can not figure out that reason. Can anyone inform me WHY it is so good to place the TAB-marks in the Calamus way and not in the other way? Because it would be terrible to know that I spend all this time rearragning TAB-marks without a good reason.


Jonas Möller Nielsen
Sweden

Hi Jonas.

Of course there is a VERY GOOD reason why Calamus treats TABulators in its own way. It's because of its "sticky" TABs.

As you might have seen already in the Calamus manual (e.g. here: [www.calamus.net]), you can define a position for a TAB in the textruler, but you will define the treatment of the TAB by chosing one of three ways how to use it.

In the first example image of the mentioned manual page, you see a TAB in the middle of a text frame. Underneath you see the three lines



This is not possible with other programs until you use THREE different RULERs. In Calamus, you simply type in:

123.[TAB]45
[TAB]Tabulator
Tabulator[TAB]

and the results are a decimal point justified tab, a left tab and a right tab, all of them using the same TAB control code in ONE RULER.

If you want to center a phrase under a certain TAB, you have to type:

[TAB]phrase[TAB]

which works with blanks within the phrase, too, as the next image shows:



You may place a [TAB] control code whereever you want, e.g. like this:

123[TAB].[TAB]45 (centering the "." under the TA
12[TAB]3.45 (left or right tabbing of the TAB position IN a phrase)

This is what we call "sticky" tabs - with very rich possibilities.



Grüße / Greetings / Groetjes / Salutations,
Ulf Dunkel · invers Software

Ok. I can see the flexibility. Smart thought out! BUT is there any easy way for me to move the TAB-marks from the beginning of a number to the end? Today I move them manually, and this is very tiresome.


Jonas Möller Nielsen
Sweden

Did you ever try EDDIE to do this for you? You will have to understand the EDDIE S&R jokers, of course.

Here is an example:

Maybe your (Word) document contains lines like this:

product #1 [TAB]21.90 $[CR/LF]
product #2 [TAB]12.90 $[CR/LF]
product #3 [TAB]99.90 $[CR/LF]

Open Eddie's S&R window and find the lines divided by jokers, like this:

1. (Joker 1, named "product name": contains everything except [TAB][CR][LF])
3. [blank][TAB]
4. (Joker 2, named "dollar price": contains cyphers only (unlimited)
5. [.]
6. (Joker 3, named "cent price": contains cyphers only (max. 2))
7. (Joker 4, named "newline": contains newline control codes only)

Then COPY these parts via the Calamus clip board into the "Replace" field of EDDIE's S&R window, e.g. like this:
part #1 (product name)
blank
part #4 (dollar price)
part #5 (dot)
[TAB]
part #6 (cent price)
part #7 (newline)

This way you can convert almost any text format within EDDIE.



Grüße / Greetings / Groetjes / Salutations,
Ulf Dunkel · invers Software