SaveAs HTML Question: tab-to-space conversion (tabular lines)

[Jay Smith <jay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings,

(FM 556 on Win95)

I was "playing" with FM's SaveAs HTML feature and think that it can do
most of what I need, but I have one question.

Situation: We have a large group of documents that we would like to
"cheaply and quickly" put in a very basic-appearing web site.  The
primary content of these documents are "tabular text" that was created
through the use of TABS in ordinary paragraph/lines.  The documents do
NOT make use of tables for this purpose.

The resulting HTML looks pretty good and the "css" style sheet looks
okay -- I can work it from there.

HOWEVER, the tabular text has been collapsed by the HTML conversion. 
The HTML source reveals that the tabs were converted to a VARYING number
of spaces in the HTML document.  

In FM what looks like this:
  field1    field2      field3
  field1    field2xxx   field3
  field1    field2X     field3

Looks like this in the HTML source/text file:
  field1    field2      field3
  field1    field2xxx      field3
  field1    field2X     field3

The number of spaces inserted by the tab-to-space conversion seems to
depend upon whether a tab stop was overrun by content or not.  To
conserve the number of Paragraph Formats being used in FM, the tabular
text uses a P.F. with multiple tab stops, some of which are extraneous
for any given application of tabular text.  Thus some lines may have
regions that overrun one or more tab stops. 

Note that the third line in the example has one more character than the
2nd line, but one space was not added by the conversion.

Regardless, because browsers collapse all "extra" white space, the
result in the browser looks like this:

  field1 field2 field3
  field1 field2xxx field3
  field1 field2X field3

The above is not readable in the manner intended (there are more than
three columns and greater variability in amount of content per field).

How can I get this (below) in HTML, without ongoing manual intervention.

  field1    field2      field3
  field1    field2xxx   field3
  field1    field2X     field3

If the tab-to-space conversion result in spacing as shown above, then I
could simply replace two or more spaces with an equal quantity of 'non
breaking spaces'.  However that won't work (automatically) because of
the column line-up mess.

Any ideas?


-- 
Jay Smith

e-mail: Jay@JaySmith.com

Jay Smith & Associates
P.O. Box 650
Snow Camp, NC  27349  USA

Phone: Int+US+336-376-9991
Toll-Free Phone in US & Canada:
	1-800-447-8267
Fax: Int+US+336-376-6750

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