284326 - create pref for changing printed tab width

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement)

Description

[Brad Fults]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12
Build Identifier: 

Printed tabs ('\t') in Gecko are printed as 8 characters wide. For many this is a silly amount of spacing, 
and in the spirit of tabs, there should be a user-configurable preference to set the desired width of 
printed tabs.

Furthermore, I think that once such a preference has been created, it should default to 4, as 8 is just 
overkill.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

What do other browsers do?

Comment 2

[Brad Fults]

Other browsers currently behave the same way that Gecko does. Lets make it
better first and offer it up as part of a "Flexible Text Display Preferences"
feature.

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
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Comment 4

[Markus Keller]

This would indeed be helpful, especially for browsing source code or patches.

Comment 5

[David Regev]

This can currently be changed with CSS:
	pre, textarea {	-moz-tab-size: 4; }
(or use this style: http://userstyles.org/styles/48300/tabsizer )

Of course, a preference in about:config would be nice. Better yet would be if the default value were simply lowered.

Comment 6

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

The CSS2 spec says that tab stops should be at 8-character positions:
  http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/text.html#white-space-model

CSS3 Text (WD) says that the initial value for tab-size should be 8 spaces:
  http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#tab-size

Given this, I don't think simply changing the default in Firefox (thus deviating from the published spec, and breaking interoperability with other browsers) is a good idea.

Comment 7

[sjw]

(-moz-)tab-size is already implemented.