Conference vaxuum::document_ft

543.0. "Tabs in a TeX file" by CRISIS::OCONNOR (Plate of Shrimp) Mon Jun 22 1987 14:37

I've been trying to use DOCUMENT to handle stuff of the following format:


	TEXT:	  And then an explanation of what is the label might be
		  and allow TeX to do line formatting for me.

		  The problem is sometimes I need to skip a line or skip 
		  to the next line without
		  line formatting

	NEXTTEXT: 

At first I tried tabs.  The following is what I tried and comes from Knuth's
book:

	\settabs 4 \columns
	\+&&Text that starts in the third column\cr
	\+&Text that starts in the secons column\cr
	\+\it Text that starts in the first column, and &&&
	  the fourth, and&beyond\cr

I get the following errors repeated many times:

	o undefined control sequence \plussign
	o improper command found: 'alignment tab character &'
	o improper command found: '\cr'

I invoke DOCUMENT with the NOTAG switch when I process my file.
My question is, am I doing something wrong when trying to use tabs?
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to handle the format I've described?

Mike O'C	

    While Knuth's book can provide a general guide, you can get into
    trouble trying to treat Document like TeX. Many of the control
    characters have been redefined in DECTeX. 
    
    If you want to force a line break, the <line> tag will do what you
    want. For text with various levels of indention, you might need
    a definition list or a table of however many columns.

    DOCUMENT doesn't know about tabs, unfortunately.  I've been using
    informal two-column lists to do what you describe.  Unfortunately,
    the font size then becomes smaller than the surrounding text (at
    least in the doctype I'm using), but it's not too bad.
    Perhaps you can get a local doctype done that uses the same size
    font in informal tables as in "normal" text, or get <DEFLIST>
    defined to produce a two-column format.