Skip to content

Developer guide: tabs replaced by spaces in code samples #18622

@SaschaCowley

Description

@SaschaCowley

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Open the Developer Guide section on symbol pronunciation (other sections also exhibit this behaviour).

  2. Read this section. In particular, take note of the fact that this is essentially a TSV file:

    Subsequent lines contain a textual identifier used to identify the symbol, a tab and the regular expression pattern for that symbol.

    and

    Subsequent lines should contain several fields separated by tabs.

Actual behavior:

The code samples provided use multiple spaces to separate values, rather than spaces:

If your language uses a thousands separator such as a full stop (.) which is handled incorrectly due to other rules, you will need to define a complex symbol pattern for it. For example, if your language uses a comma (,) as its thousands separator, you would include the following in the complex symbols section:

thousands separator (?<=\d)\,(?=\d) 

You would also include something like the following in the main symbols section:

thousands separator comma all norep

Even though the source code uses tabs.

If your language uses a thousands separator such as a full stop (.) which is handled incorrectly due to other rules, you will need to define a complex symbol pattern for it.
For example, if your language uses a comma (,) as its thousands separator, you would include the following in the complex symbols section:
```re
thousands separator (?<=\d)\,(?=\d)
```
You would also include something like the following in the main symbols section:
```
thousands separator comma all norep
```

Expected behavior:

The generated HTML should faithfully reproduce tabs inserted in code blocks. This is particularly important for TSV-type files, where tabs are syntactically meaningful. Our coding standards also prescribe using tabs for indentation.

NVDA logs, crash dumps and other attachments:

N/A

System configuration

NVDA installed/portable/running from source:

N/A

NVDA version:

Tested with 2025.2beta5 Developer Guide.

Windows version:

N/A

Name and version of other software in use when reproducing the issue:

N/A

Other information about your system:

N/A

Other questions

Does the issue still occur after restarting your computer?

N/A

Have you tried any other versions of NVDA? If so, please report their behaviors.

Yes:

Thus, I hypothesise that this was introduced by the transition from text2tags to markdown.

If NVDA add-ons are disabled, is your problem still occurring?

N/A

Does the issue still occur after you run the COM Registration Fixing Tool in NVDA's tools menu?

N/A

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions