Why is tab unaffected by font whereas space is affected?

[Jonathan Coxhead]

   Surely the reason is that tab is a control character, but space is a
printing character. Fonts consist only of printing characters.

   Cheers

～ʝ (Jonathan, bronze sponsor of ʝ)


On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 12:30 PM Eli Zaretskii via Unicode <
unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> > Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 16:09:41 +0100
> > From: Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
> >
> > In some editors, e.g. Emacs 24.4.2, changing the font does
> > significantly change the position.  (For most Emacs modes, one nowadays
> > has to specify the character as U+0009 to enter the tab as a character.)
>
> Emacs uses a fixed number of space_width pixels to display a TAB.
> Since space_width varies with font, so does the width of a TAB.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/mailman/private/unicode/attachments/20200418/d1a5b0ca/attachment.htm>