Re: Inconsistent Indentation

[Kai Großjohann]

Wm. G. McGrath <wgm@telus.net> writes:

> I'm bewildered by my inability to get emacs 20.7.1 to insert white
> space properly at the start of a paragraph in
> paragraph-indent-text-mode with auto-fill. This is such a small
> thing for a text editor to be so frustrating.
>
> C-q TAB will sometimes insert 4 spaces, sometimes a TAB (8 spaces)
> and at others 11 and even more. 

Hm.  C-q TAB should always insert one tab character, and this tab
character looks like a varying number of spaces.  For example, if you
have a line containing "a TAB b" and another line with "c d TAB e",
then it will look like this:

a       b
cd      e

As you can see, the first tab "looks like" seven spaces, whereas the
second tab "looks like" five spaces.

> TAB will sometimes insert 4 spaces, sometimes 6, sometimes 8 and so
> on.

By default, TAB will advance to the next space in the line above.
This makes it easy to align things.

Here is an example line.
     ^  ^  ^       ^

The "^" characters show the spots where TAB moves to.
-- 
A preposition is not a good thing to end a sentence with.