Use tab key for column alignment

[Bryce Harrington]

Currently, the tab key does not insert a tab character
when in text edit mode. If you paste from an external
source, it is displayed as a newline. Using the text
editor dialog, you can enter tabs and they are
displayed as a single space.

The SVG spec requires that tab characters in text
elements be converted to a single space character. In
other words, tabs are irrelevant to SVG documents.

Yet in practice, tabbing can be a handy way of doing
certain kinds of layout, such as getting text aligned
in columns, or getting bulletted or numbered lists to
look right. Currently you can work around the lack of
tab support by breaking up the text into separate text
elements and carefully aligning each of them manually.

It would be nice if Inkscape made use of tab for doing
automatic text layout. Since tab characters are
ignored anyway, this gives a huge amount of freedom in
how it could be done. One idea would be to allow the
user to place 'tab stops' on the ruler, and then when
the user hits tab while editing text, kerning is used
to position the next character to the right to match up
with that stop (an issue would be what happens if the
user moves the text...)

[nightrow (jb-benoit)]

I can only agree, using tab to do formatting is a nice idea

[wulf solter (wulfsolter)]

This is the biggest thing keeping illustrator installed at the moment. If someone wishes to mentor, I am keen..

[su_v (suv-lp)]

related:
Bug #244206 “Tabulator for Text tool needed”
Bug #269141 “ TAB works improperly in flowed text area”

[marque (vivideo)]

So, this bug has been is open for five years. Is there an other reason to keep the tab-setting behaving this way? Maybe the possibility to switch between the two functions would a solution?

[aldero (ancabe)]

This is a *key feature* for many projects.
Without this feature it is impossible or extremely complex to organize the text. In my case is a hurdle to "get the job done".
I would give to this feature a very high priority in the wish list.

thanks a lot for your efforts!

[marque (vivideo)]

almost ten years..

[Andreas John (derjohn)]

10+

[Giovani-BR (giovanith)]

More than one decade the Tab "problem" was reported, and Inkscape still does not handle Tabs as we would like...

Please developers, this is a important aspect in many projects/texts.
Come on./.......

Tks

[Giancarlo (gianop)]

It's 2019 and no tabulation in Inkscape...

[Alec Eiffel (alec.eiffel)]

It's 2022 and no tabulation (or column management) in Inkscape...

It's even more needed since the new release bring pages management.

[Jennifer Gibson-Johnson (thegr8gibsoni)]

Having a tab stop/ruler for text editing would be an amazing feature in Inkscape. Please add this functionality!

[Alexis Bicât (yancytoo)]

First off, thank you Inkscape developers for working so hard on a project that is excellent and free. Brilliant. I am having this issue too. Either columns or a TAB plus ruler solution. In fact, a stand alone paragraph tool is what is required. So horizontal kerning and multiple different justifications within a single text box can be achieved.