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Atab stop ortabulator position on atypewriter is a location where the carriage movement is halted by an adjustable end stop. Tab stops are set manually, and pressing thetab key causes the carriage to go to the next tab stop. Intext editors on a computer, the same concept is implemented simplistically with automatic, fixed tab stops.
Modernword processors generalize this concept by offering tab stops that have an alignment attribute and cause the text to be automatically aligned at left, at right or center of the tab stop itself. Such tab stops areparagraph-specific properties and can be moved to a different location in any moment, or even removed.
Sometimes, placeholders incode snippets are also called "tab stops" because the user can cycle through them by pressing the tab key.[1]
A tab stop is a horizontal position which is set for placing and aligning text on a page. There are at least five kinds of tab stops in general usage in word processing or inMicrosoft Word.
In contrast to fixed positioning, tab stops can be adjusted dynamically, based on the length of adjacent tab-delimited line segments, by alignment to a specific character or string in each line, etc.Adobe InDesign supports a non-printing "indent to here" character.
In 2006, Nick Gravgaard published an algorithm for automatic dynamic tab stops called "Elastic tabstops".[2] This can be useful for viewing/editing source code and is naturally essential for tabular data.[3] Various text editors and IDEs have implemented the elastic tabstops algorithm either directly or by extension.