PC Win: Certain Tab and Hyphen Characters Are Modified

• Microsoft Mail for Windows, version 3.2

SYMPTOMS

A message sent from Mail for Windows may be modified by the system when it is sent. There are two modifications that may take place when hyphens or tabs are used. When you type a hyphen character (-) in a message, the Windows client adds a spaces before it if the hyphen is in the first or 78th position of the line.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Install Mail for Windows.

2. Send the following message:

   NOTE: Because they exceed the 76 character limit, the third and fourth and fifth and sixth lines should be on one line.

   tab0   tab1   tab2
   alongword   tab3
   

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

1. When the message is received, the hyphens characters in positions one and seventy-eight are replaced by a space. The tabulation seems to be the same.

2. Print out the message using the standard MSMAIL3.FON. You will see that the tabulation has been changed and that tab3 is now aligned with tab1.

CAUSE

The tabulation in the Microsoft Mail Edit window is different from what is sent to the printer. In the Mail client, the tabulation is at position 9 followed by a tab every 8 positions which gives:

123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345 67

t       t       t       t       t       t       t       t       t

123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345 67

t       t       t       t       t       t       t       t       t

WORKAROUND

The only way to prevent hyphen characters from being converted to spaces is to start lines in the second column and end in the 77th column. It is difficult to get a message with tab characters to print out the same way it looks on the screen.