It seems that tabstops are not preserved when saving to TEXT or HTML. Isn't there any way to preserve these tabstops even in the TEXT file just by adding spaces for example.
Hi,
They are preserved. Why do you think they aren't? Please attach a sample document.
Ah you probably meant custom tab stops. Then yes… alas, it is not trivial to calculate the number of spaces required to substitute a particular tab stop (more exact, it is hard to calculate what tab character corresponds to what tab stop). Sorry we do not plan to implement this anytime soon.
Hmm, why should this be so hard.. the position is already known also for example when exporting to PDF. So shouldn't it be something like deviding the space between the previous character by the character width (and inserting that many space characters)? (which will be fixed after conversion)
And for HTML conversion..well this should be easy because it's possible to work with pixel spaces.
You say you're not planning to implement this anytime soon, maybe it's possible to fund this development?
Imagine you have the following as the input:
Text of a paragraph with several tab characters.
The quick brown fox jumps \tover the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The qu\tick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown f\tox jumps over the lazy dog. The \tquick brown f\tox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Paragraph formatting: left indent = X, right indent = Y, first line indent = Z, etc.
Tab stops: 1.42 cm with left alignment, 2.15 cm with left alignment, 3.56 cm with center alignment, 4.70 cm with right alignment.
The paragraph consists of runs with different font size and other formatting.
Any idea on implementing a simple algorithm that would allow to calculate the length of each tab space and thus the number of space characters required to substitute it?
Regarding your last question... sorry but AFAIK this is not a common practice to us. Roman (team lead) will correct me if I'm wrong.
Thanks.
True, from the document source it is hard to convert to text. I thought the convertor had build in knownledge of text positions like an visual editor should have (for displaying it correctly). Otherwise you'd have to calculate the width of each string part formatted in the correct font, taking in account the correct wrapping of the paragraph etc.... not impossible but a lot of work if you're not working with visual positions but with formatting data.
In my case it doesn't have to be that advanced, since only one fixed size monospaced font is expected in the source documents. Maybe I should build a workarround converting to rtf first and replace tabs with spaces in there before offering it to the aspose conversion.
Thnx for the quick feedback