Re: [orca-list] Tabs with brltty and orca

[Sérgio Neves <sergionevess gmail com>]

Hi,
Sorry for my ignorance, but I haven't understood this yet.
Why is tab key displayed as a unique character both on screen and on braille 
display, but this unique character occupies the exact space on screen in a 
way that for sighted people the text looks indented, but on the perspective 
of the braille display it isn't indented, or is indented with a number of 
spaces that in fact it does not have?
It doesn't make sense to me.
I have already understood that the problem is not on orca or on brltty, but 
this situation is strange to me because if it is the operating system that 
is responsible for managing this appearance, why isn't this appearance 
uniform on the two output devices?
With nano, when I press tab, it appears both on screen and on braille 
display what is expected, and when I press backspace once, the tab character 
is all deleted.
I have configured gedit to transform tabs in spaces, but I would like to 
understand this and to have a solution for this problem (in my view it's a 
problem, lol).

Thanks

Best regards

Sérgio Neves
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gaijin" <gaijin clearwire net>
To: <orca-list gnome org>
Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2007 9:25 PM
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Tabs with brltty and orca


On Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 03:08:22PM -0000, Sérgio Neves wrote:
> When I press the tab key on graphical editors, such as gedit and eclipse, 
> my
> braille display presents a strange character (that occupies one cell),

It's a Tab character.  Understand that the Tab is only one
character to the computer, and is treated differently than a standard
alpha-numeric character, and may be displayed as a variable length of
white-space, much like the new-line or carriage return characters.  nano
most likely displays the Tab character by displaying it as spaces,
rather than as an actual Tab character.  If nano converts the character
to spaces, it will take more than a single backspace to remove it, while
a non-converted Tab takes only one backspace to remove it.  The computer
doesn't know what a Tab is.  To the computer, it is just another numeric
variable in memory to be displayed on the screen as a specific amount of
white-space, or like a character with special instructions associated with
it, much like an alias or a script.  All that you're actually seeing is
that there are two ways of displaying the Tab character.  nano is
converting the character to white-space on it's own, while other editors
are letting the operating system handle how things are
being presented.  Nano is just converting your key-press to multiple spaces. 
HTH,

Michael

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