Setting Tabs

VoodooPad allows you to set tab positions to help line up decimal points and words from line to line. Since this principal is fairly hard to describe, you might find it helpful to follow along with this walkthrough.

Start out by making sure that you've turned your ruler on. You may also find it helpful to start a new page in your VoodooPad document, so that the things we do here don't muck up whatever else you are working on.

Try typing out the following, spacing out each word or number from the other by hitting the tab key once.



You'll now need to select all of the text that you've just written.

In order to effect a change on our text, it always needs to be selected first

Now go to the text ruler at the top of the window and drag all the tab stops (right pointing triangles) that are to the left of the 5" mark out of the ruler. Don't worry if words or numbers you've selected seem to go a bit berserk. They'll come back into order shortly.

Look for the tab stop well at the far right of the ruler which looks like this:



Put your mouse pointer on each of the icons in the tab stop well for a couple seconds until a label appears. You'll see that they are called from left to right respectively, the "Left tab stop", the "Center tab stop", the "Right tab stop" and the "Decimal tab stop".

Now drag a left tab stop from the tab stop well to the ruler and drop it at the top of the 3/4" mark. Next drag a Center tab stop from the well and drop it on the 2 1/4" mark. Next drag a Decimal tab stop from the well and drop it on the 3 1/4" mark. Finally, drag a Decimal tab stop from the well and drop it on the 4 1/4" mark.

If you've done this correctly, your text should now look like this:



Notice that the words in the Item column are left justified in the column. The numbers in the Quantity column are centered and the money amounts in the Price and Amount columns are aligned on their decimal points.

You can also clean this up a bit by using different tab stops for the heading line, and easily get something that looks like this



You can also try and use tables to achieve a lot of the same effects. Check out this section on Tables

Back to VoodooPad -> Editing Text