Columns not aligned properly in Eudora Pro 4.x

Lining Up Columns Of Text

Always use tabs and not spaces as a means to line up text columns.

There are two factors which affect how columns of text (tab separated) are displayed in Eudora.

1. Which viewer is being used for displaying messages.

2. Which font was used to generate the columns of text.

Eudora has two viewers - the Microsoft Viewer and the native viewer. The native viewer can translate tab characters whereas the Microsoft viewer cannot (MS viewer changes tab chars to multiple continuous spaces).

The native viewer should display the columns correctly in all cases.

In the case of the Microsoft viewer, use a fixed width font to view the messages. Either unselect "Use proportional font by default" in the Tools->Options->Font category OR open the message in a separate read message window and click on the FW (Fixed width button) to view the message using a fixed width font.

The message font used to generate the message is also important especially if using the MS viewer. The receiver must view the message either using a fixed width font or the same font as that used by the creator of the message in order for the tabs to look lined up.

More Info on Tabs

Eudora has two settings related to tabs, TabSpaces and TabStop. Tabstop determines the tab positions and TabSpaces determines whether the tab character will be preserved as a tab literal or changed to spaces. The TabSpaces setting is only for plain text messages since HTML does not support tab characters. The tabs are changed to spaces automatically in the latter case.

If TabSpaces is set (value is 1), then the tab character is translated to the number of spaces depending on the number of characters from the beginning of the line. Eg: If TabStop=8 and TabSpaces=1, and there are18 characters on that line, the tab gets translated to 6 spaces. (8 - (number of characters MOD 8))

There are two types of fonts in Windows, proportional fonts and fixed width fonts. The width of each character is the same for fixed width fonts but not for proportional fonts. When we replace a tab character with the correct number of spaces, if viewed with a fixed width font, the tab stops will seem to be lined up. But with proportional fonts, they will be slightly misaligned because the width of each character is not the same. For example if you type 4 f's and 4 w's on different lines, they do not occupy the same amount of space. A tab after each of these lines will not start at the same position for that very reason.

Workarounds

1. Uncheck the Microsoft viewer, since the native viewer handles tabs better.

2. Use a fixed width font as the message font. (Settings-Fonts)

3. If the Message font is a proportional font, then you can open up the message and click the FW button to view that particular message in a fixed font. The tabstops will then appear to be lined up.

KEYWORDS: EPWIN, TABS, COLUMNS, ALIGN, DISPLAY, VIEW, FORMAT, CROOKED