A tab stop on a typewriter is a location where the carriage movement is halted by mechanical gears. Tab stops are set manually, and pressing the tab key causes the carriage to go to the next tab stop. In text editors on a computer, the same concept is implemented simplistically with automatic, fixed tab stops.
Modern word 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 are paragraph-specific properties and can be moved to a different location in any moment, or even removed.
Read more about Tab Stop: Types of Tab Stops, Elastic Tabstops
Famous quotes containing the word stop:
“You don’t hit a child when you want him to stop hitting. You don’t yell at a children to get them to stop yelling. Or spit at a child to indicate that he should not spit. Of course, you want children to know how to sympathize with others and to “know how it feels,” but you ... have to show them how to act—not how not to act.”
—Jeannette W. Galambos (20th century)