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|D |5The Happy Hacker |D
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^C^1Detab
^C(Tab Expander Utility)
^Cby
^CJeffrey Rush

   Jeff Rush is famous in the FidoNet BBS community for being the creator of 
Echomail, which revolutionized the BBS network by providing discussion forums 
shared across many bulletin board systems.  (Call our BBS at 318-222-3503 to see 
for yourself.)  He now joins our stable of contributors with a new utility. 
Detab is useful if you must deal with text files that are full of tab 
characters, but your printer doesn't understand tabs or assumes tabstops 
different from those used in the document.  Detab replaces tabs by spaces to fit 
tabstops which you can set. 

   This utility will read the standard input (keyboard), expand any tabs found, 
and write the result to the standard output (screen).  To do input and output 
directly to files, use the DOS redirection operators "<" and ">" (e.g., to get 
input from IN.TXT and output to OUT.TXT, use "DETAB <IN.TXT >OUT.TXT").  The tab 
settings default to every 8, which is the PC-DOS standard, but may be redefined 
to any boundaries.

   Usage: DETAB {<tabstops>}

   The only parameters on the command line are the tabstops.  If none are given, 
every 8 is assumed.  If they are specified, tabs are set at those columns.  In 
addition, tabs are assumed at those columns which are a multiple of the last 
pair of tabstops given. 

Examples:

    C>DETAB 4 8 12 16 <MYLETTER.DOC >PRN:
        This sets tabstops at columns 4, 8, 12 and 16 AS WELL AS AT 20,
        24, 28, 32, etc.  The text is read from the file MYLETTER.DOC and
        sent to the printer.

    C>DETAB 10 16 20 22 <MYLETTER.DOC >NOTABS.DOC
        This sets tabstops at columns 10, 16, 20 and 22 AS WELL AS AT 24,
        26, 28, 30, 32, etc.  The last two stops, 20 and 22, specified a
        gap of 2 columns, meaning place tabstops every 2 columns after
        column 22.

   Since this is intended as a command line utility, you can't run it from the 
BIG BLUE DISK menu.  Type ^1DETAB^0 with appropriate parameters as shown above, 
from the DOS command line.

DISK FILES THIS PROGRAM USES:
^FDETAB.EXE
