Re: [orca-list] Tips and tricks for Orca and Firefox

[Andrew Hart <ahart42 gmail com>]

On 15/08/2020 13:55, Mewtamer via orca-list wrote:> While I'm familiar 
with tabulation as a fancy term for adding things
> up, especially in the context of summing a bill of order, and
> tabulator is easily parsed as someone who does tabulation or a machine
> designed for doing so, it never occurred to me that the tab key might
> refer to tabulation, and honestly, that connection doesn't really
> explain the key's name origin... never gave it much thought, but one
> has to wonder why it isn't called the indent key since that was the
> key's primary function prior to the advent of webpages and the primary
> function of the character it generates when used for text input
> instead of application control.

To answer the question about how the tab key got its name:
the Tab key is a key that was available on mechanical typewriter 
keyboards long before modern computer keyboards were designed. It is 
called the tab key because its primary function was to make it much 
simpler to tabulate information on a typewriter, not merely to indent.

Tabulate means  to arrange in tabular form. It also means to set out in 
a list or to enumerate, which is the definition referred to above. 
Tabulating (or tabulation) is not so much the action of summing up 
accounts or items on a bill/invoice/etc.; rather it is the act of 
listing itself, which also includes relevant totals presented in the 
tabular form.

The tab key gets its name from the first definition. Typewriters would 
allow the typist to set tab stops at different positions on the line and 
then to quickly advance the carriage to the next tab stop in sequence 
from left to right, bi-passing the 
keypress-ribbon-strike-carriage-advance mechanism.
On computers, the Tab key normally assumes that tap stops are regularly 
placed every 2, 4 or perhaps 8 characters, depending on the context and 
the ASCII 9 code for Tab actually means move the print head to the next 
tab stop and used to work on old dot matrix printers, which, in the 
beginning,  were essentially electric typewriters without a keyboard.

Tabbing is not the same as as indenting, because you can tab after 
typing text. Indenting means to offset the first word of a line from the 
left margin. In contrast, many tables could start at the left margin and 
the Tab key would be pressed to position the type head for typing 
subsequent columns of information.
Tabs are even used to format  console output by console application and 
command-line utilities as the screen drivers know how to interpret ASCII 
control codes.

Of course, on a manual typewriter, it was common practice to set a tab 
stop at column 6 and use the tab key to indent the first line of a new 
paragraph (giving a 5-space paragraph indent). In this case,  the tab 
and the indent are more or less the same thing, but to split hairs and 
be technical, the tab is actually being used to make the indent.

I hope I haven't bored you with this explanation.

Hth.