Tabs in <dm> blocks

ID:1627200
 
Jul 14 2014, 1:57 am
Status: Open
Issue hasn't been assigned a status value.
Can we please get support for tabbing in [dm] blocks? I don't like posting my code and then having tabs converted to 4 spaces. It makes sharing code a lot harder than it needs to be.
Jul 14 2014, 4:34 am
They support tabs.
Jul 14 2014, 7:18 am
We can accept the tabs, but if you mean having them display with tab characters, I don't see how that could be done without bowing to the whim of the browser. My understanding is that control over spaces per tab in <pre> tags isn't widespread.
Jul 14 2014, 8:00 am
I found a hack that uses Adobe Flash to make a button that will copy text directly to the clipboard. It seems to work with all current browsers, so it might be a good workaround, or even the only cross-browser workaround that will preserve the actual tab characters.

I guess it just depends on how hard it would be to implement this.
Jul 14 2014, 6:18 pm
Really? Whenever I copy code out of a DM block I get the tabs converted to spaces.

That means someone puts a snippet up then I have to use 'advanced find and replace' to replace all 4 spaces to tabs within the dream maker.

Are you sure they support tabs? Have you ever taken code out of a block that was posted and it copied the tabs?
Jul 14 2014, 6:19 pm
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. You don't like that they convert tabs to 4 spaces. I thought you didn't like converting your code to 4 spaces in order to post them.

My bad.
Jul 14 2014, 6:22 pm
Oh right yeah easy mistake. Yeah that's exactly what I mean. Everyone who has posted or used a snippet already deals with it in their own way but if the conversion could be taken out that would be amazing.
Jul 14 2014, 6:34 pm
Related: Tab in Forums
Apr 5 2015, 7:38 am
In response to Lummox JR
Is it not possible to—upon submitting a post—convert all instances of N spaces to the \t character? Perhaps even a specifier could be added to the start of <dm> tags to give the syntax highlighter an idea of what you want:

// Use tabs for indention for the rest of the snippet:
/* indent: tab */

// Use four spaces for indention in this snippet:
/* indent: spaces; width: 4 */

// Convert all instances of two spaces to a tab for this snippet:
/* indent: spaces-to-tab; width: 2 */
Apr 5 2015, 6:20 pm
In response to LordAndrew
The original post is about the fact that on display, tabs are converted to 4 spaces. It's not that the poster is using 4 spaces and wants the tab character in their place.

The problem is if we don't convert to spaces, the browser controls how many spaces it actually shows--which is 8 for most of them by default. Most browsers allow tab-size to be set (albeit usually with a prefix), except for IE which doesn't support it even in IE11.
Apr 5 2015, 7:05 pm
What about an attribute for the <dm> tag such as "tabsize=4"? Would that be a possibility? Is it possible to parse this information so that it changes tab-size appropriately?
example:
<dm tabsize="4">
Apr 5 2015, 9:26 pm
In response to Mr_Goober
Mr_Goober wrote:
What about an attribute for the <dm> tag such as "tabsize=4"? Would that be a possibility? Is it possible to parse this information so that it changes tab-size appropriately?
example:
<dm tabsize="4">

That would only be relevant to the post filter that translates the <dm> tag and its contents into real HTML. It doesn't solve the OP's problem, that he wants the tabs preserves so that copying to the clipboard will leave them intact.