TextAnnotations - TabRun

[claudiaareneee]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I would like to be able to insert tabs into a TextBlock. It's just whitespace, so I'm thinking something similar to LineBreakRun that adds whitespace for tabbing.

Update*

Example use case:

User hits the tab key to indent the beginning of a paragraph. It should count as one character. When the user hits backspace, the whole tab should be deleted. I propose adding a new run called TabRun to act both as a single unit for this action and as a way of persisting this information.

Describe the solution you'd like

A new type of run should be created called TabRun

• StyleOverrides should include a spaces property to specify how many spaces make up a tab. Usually 2 or 4 spaces. Default would be 4.
• In the stringify method, users should be able to specify if they want their tabs to be computed with spaces or as a tab ("\t") character.

[pmconne]

Can you please clarify the problem you are solving (not "I want this" but "user is trying to do X and I propose solving it via Y")?
I want to assume that you want to preserve in the text block that the user inserted tabs, not spaces, so when the user re-edits it and presses backspace over a tab it deletes all the inserted spaces?

[claudiaareneee]

Modified the description to be more explicit

[pmconne]

To be clear, number of spaces per tab could only be applied when editing the text. At display time it must be fixed - each user couldn't independently decide how many spaces they want to see.

[claudiaareneee]

Exactly, yes.

I assume it would similar to other style attributes like stackedFractionType or lineSpacingFactor that are used when computing the graphics. To change these settings, the user would have to edit the text itself. In our case, using out text editor.

Truthfully, I can't see a user doing this often, but instead of hardcoding '4', we could treat it like lineSpacingFactor as that's the pattern that's already there.