Setting Tabs Correctly

If I understand your question right, the spaces depend entirely on the font and font size. It has nothing (or at least very little) to do with if it is Pages or MS Word.

Your professor is right ONLY if you are using a 'monospace' font. I hope she's not teaching Word Processing.

Inches and spaces are NOT always identical. The primary variable is the font in use which may or may not use five space to reach .5 inches. A 'monospace' font, (aka 'fixed width' font) such as Courier will meet this requirement because a space takes up as much room as a single character. Other fonts, such as Helvetica or Times Roman use less room for spaces and for narrow letters like "i" and "l" and more space for the letters like "m" and "w". Therefore the word "wills" takes up less space when using the Helvetica font than it does when using the Courier font.

As long as the tabs are .5 inches apart, the number of spaces needed to reach .5 inches is irrelevant for formatting purposes. (That is, unless the formatting requirements also specify what font to use.) But if you want to keep the prof happy and avoid any confusion or dispute over how many characters will equal a tab stop and want each space/character to equal .1 inches, use a monospace font like Courier at 12 point size. Other monospace fonts include Courier New, Monaco and Andale Mono.

Good luck,

Terry

Message was edited by: Terry Keelan1

"Times New Roman" is NOT a fixed width font and you will never make five spaces equal .5 inches without constantly tweaking the letterspacing.

If Times New Roman uses five space/.5 inches on your professor's computer she's either using a version of Times New Roman that is uniquely hers or she is just wrong.

The ONLY way to guarantee that five space will equal .5 inches in your document is to use a monospaced or fixed width font, such as Courier or the others I have listed.

As long as each tab is .5 inches I don't really understand why there is an issue. Is your professor counting the number of characters in the line below the tab to make sure there are only five there? Surely she has better things to do than apply a ruler to your research paper to measure out the tabs and type. Surely you have better things to do than to worry about this, too.

Good luck,

Terry

The Microsoft Word way of indenting the first line of a paragraph is to insert a 0.5" tab. The "proper" way is to use an indent.



Then create a new style & call it something like "indent."

The following comments are just small corrections of details in the previous posts. The main points and advice given to you in the posts are still very valid.

1. The width of a space is treated the same in proportional and non-proportional fonts. The width of characters changes, however.

2. The Microsoft Word way of indenting the first line of a paragraph has nothing to do with tabs (except as a strange keyboard shortcut). Since at least MS Word 1.0 for OS/2, Word has given the user the possibility to add proper indentation.

But the advice is still the same: do not use spaces or tabs for indentation unless you write non-formatted text and text files.

Every Word document I've ever received with an "indented" first line has a tab at the beginning of a paragraph. I rarely create a file in Word, but I recall it putting in the tab even though I didn't want it to. Just like Word puts physical tab markers every half inch, rather than default but not visible tabs like Pages & AppleWorks, it appears to be the "Microsoft way."

Peggy wrote:
Every Word document I've ever received with an "indented" first line has a tab at the beginning of a paragraph. I rarely create a file in Word, but I recall it putting in the tab even though I didn't want it to. Just like Word puts physical tab markers every half inch, rather than default but not visible tabs like Pages & AppleWorks, it appears to be the "Microsoft way."

Just like inexperienced users of Pages probably use the "five spaces" or "one tab" indent of the paragraphs, many Word users have done so. I have worked with quite a few of them.

I never quite understood the shortcut logic in Word, but I know how to use it, and it works.

If you start a paragraph with a tab, you get a tab.

If you start a paragraph with text, then go back to the beginning of the paragraph and press tab, you get an indent - not a tab.

If you have a paragraph starting with either an indent or a tab, and you press backspace, the indent or tab goes away. In this case it is transparent for the user if you have one or the other.

There is no problem creating a style in Word with an indent, just like in Pages.

If you import a Word file with tabs or indents at the beginning of paragraphs, Pages keeps the original formatting perfectly - tab and indent stay the same. A style in Word with an indent also imports fine to Pages.

Tabs in Word are not physical. It is the same logic as in Pages. If you have not assigned any tab manually, both Word and Pages set default "ghost" tabs at every half inch. As soon as you add your first manual tab, all the previous "ghost" tabs are replaced by the manual tab you add. The main difference is that Word displays the ghost tabs, so users can tell where they are.

I am pretty sure this was all working the same way already in MS Word 1.0 for OS/2 more than 15 years ago. (One can imagine how many updates people have paid for since then to use exactly the same functionality today.)

Tabs in Word are not physical. It is the same logic as in Pages. If you have not assigned any tab manually, both Word and Pages set default "ghost" tabs at every half inch. As soon as you add your first manual tab, all the previous "ghost" tabs are replaced by the manual tab you add. The main difference is that Word displays the ghost tabs, so users can tell where they are.

Opening any Word document or pasting its contents into a Pages or AppleWorks document will reveal physical tabs in the ruler. They must be manually removed. Or you can apply a Pages paragraph style that doesn't have them.

Fascinating! I never noticed that in AppleWorks, and I can confirm that it happens for me too. However, it does not happen for me in Pages. If it had not happened for you in Pages, I would have said that AppleWorks' Word import had a bug, but now I do not really know how to explain it.

Why does Pages import it in one way on my machine and another on yours? I assume you also have Word 2004? I suppose it is one of the esoteric settings in Word somewhere.

I still cannot explain why you see physical tabs in Pages, but I think I have some kind of explanation for my Mac.

In AppleWorks you cannot set the distance between default tabs, as far as I know. However, you can do it in Word. So when AppleWorks imports a Word document, it converts the ghost tabs to real tabs, to be sure that the formatting stays the same, in case the Word user had changed anything.

In Pages, you can set the distance between default tabs, and Pages correctly imports the ghost tab distance from Word documents.