I seem to be posting to this forum a lot today, well that's what it's here for. Once again, thanks everyone.

I'm using a calc field to make the body of an e-mail. I want to be able to put a tab into a body of text. I tried copy and pasting one in, and its there in the calc, but in the final version it's not. Any other ideas?

-j

I guess the TAB is not valid character in Text or HTML emails.

No, tabs are not part of ASCII character set. They are not supported in HTML either!

Instead of tabs use a bunch of spaces.

BTW how do you put a tab into text with a calculation?

Tabs in a calculation - Warning: InElegant solution follows...

The only way I've done this in the past has been to have a global field "g_Tab" which contains a single TAB. Option Tab on Mac or CTRL Tab on Windows. Then you can use this global field in calculations which deliver a text result, such as:

code:

---

DisplayText = FirstName & g_Tab & LastName & g_Tab & City

Russ

quote:

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Originally posted by Russell Baker:

Tabs in a calculation - Warning: InElegant solution follows...

The only way I've done this in the past has been to have a global field "g_Tab" which contains a single TAB. Option Tab on Mac or CTRL Tab on Windows. Then you can use this global field in calculations which deliver a text result, such as:

code:

---

DisplayText = FirstName & g_Tab & LastName & g_Tab & City

Russ

---

Interesting. I guess i'll just space everything out then. Not quite as neat, but it does the job

If you set up the field in Layout mode to include tab sets, then when you tab in the field, it'll work.

As to putting a tab character into a calculation, I have taken this approach. Go to Layout, select the text tool an click anywhere. Type a character, then the tab key, then another character. Select the blank area between the two characters and Copy. Then delete the text box. Then in your calculation, type two double quotation marks and paste between them. Works every time.

You cannot simply insert spaces in html, because some browsers will strip all excess spaces over one space away, thus the user will not see your tab space.

What I do is insert the html code for a space "&nbsp" (without quotes) into my text. Add as many as you wish and thus you will control how many spaces you wish to display. I'm sure you can configure a script to add the code.

Also, in html if you wish to add line returns or paragraph breaks, you should use the code "<br>" (without quotes). The <br> inserts a return line. <br><br> inserts two line breaks, like starting a new paragraph.

To begin a new paragraph with a tab space insert, I'd do something like this.

<br><br>&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp.

HTH

Barry