Re: Gnumeric Documentation styleguide

[Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho ifi uio no>]

[Adrian Custer]

>   This should be a non-issue. The fact that it remains an issue is,
>   I believe due to emacs broken-ness. Indenting should be done with
>   tabs, and users allowed to set how big they want their
>   tabstops. The files themselves should have tab characters for
>   indentation.

(stop tickling my hobby horse :)

This is fine, if you are very careful and only use TAB for the
baseline indentation.  Here's a C code example (I realize this problem
isn't so critical in SGML):

        fprintf (stderr, _("foo: %s is too big, please try again.\n"),
                 value);

It is very tempting to use two TABs and a space in the second line,
but it will screw up the indentation when you change the tab width to
something else than the standard 8.  Another example:

        char *          name;           /* actually filename */
        struct stat *   stat_buf;       /* useless comment */

Again, only the leading eight spaces should be replaced by a TAB, the
rest should be just spaces.

So, in theory, it could all work, but I know of no software which does
it right.  Neither GNU indent nor GNU Emacs will be suitably
conservative in their use of TAB.

>   However, I have no idea how to make emacs use tabs instead of
>   spaces. I know it can read them, I don't know if it can output
>   them.

You can change the TAB width in Emacs using the variable tab-width.
It's buffer local, so you should set it in a hook.

-- 
Kjetil T.               abusing standards for the greater good
                        http://www.microsoft.com:products 3333866552/