6.8.1 Understanding differences in tab behavior

FrameMaker uses absolute tabs; Word uses relative tabs:

Absolute:	Tab stops are specified at fixed positions; if the line before a tab runs past the tab position, the tab has no effect.
Relative:	Wherever you are in a line, a tab causes a move to the next tab stop. Add or delete a few letters, and the text at the end (after all the tabs) can jump to the wrong columns.

To determine how many relative tabs to put out for RTF, Mif2Go must know two things:

• the intended tab position

• the current tab position.

Mif2Go stores the intended position. The current position must be computed, based on character size, character spacing, expansion and compression, and so forth.

Font metrics

Computing character size for tab spacing is problematic. Because the combined font-metric information for all available fonts would exceed the capacity of many hard drives, Mif2Go simplifies font metrics by using PostScript relative-character-width rules and a single number, which you can specify in the configuration file; see §6.8.4 Altering font metrics to adjust tabs.

Unused tabs

If a FrameMaker paragraph format (for example, Header 1) includes unused tabs, and the text before an unused tab ends very close to the position of that tab, Mif2Go might calculate that the text extends beyond the tab, while Word calculates that it stops before the tab, and therefore uses the “wrong” tab. The best way to correct this problem is to remove the unused tab from the FrameMaker format. The other remedy is to import a FrameMaker conversion template that defines the format in question without the unused tab; see §2.4 Importing formats from a conversion template.

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