Tabulation characters ('\t') are not rendered in chat

[stepa2]

E.g. following E2 code displays as 'FirstSecondThird' in chat but 'First Second Third' in console.

print("First","Second","Third")

[Earu]

Hi, thank you for opening this issue. Could you please check these details:

• Have you checked the vanilla behavior of chat.AddText?
• What's the behavior of what you're trying to do in the default source engine chat?

[stepa2]

It works with no third-party chat addons installed. I am pretty sure that is because RichText or what control is used in engine supports tabulation rendering.

[Earu]

Are you in x64 or default?

[stepa2]

dev branch

[Earu]

After testing and asking multiple people, heres what I found:

• On default branches (no chromium): Tab chars work but they are rendered as spaces by the RichText engine panels.

• On x64 (with modern RichText): The tab chars are turned into spaces. This might be a side-effect of the pre html tag that's used by RichTextX.

I'm not sure whether replacing \t by 4 or 6 spaces in these panels is a good idea, if you want to copy something it might look weird if it's done. Can't see how to fix this otherwise as both problems come from things I do not have control over.

[stepa2]

It is probable that surface text drawing functions not handle tabs. https://github.com/Earu/EasyChat/blob/5b8601ab82a0abdded61c6ea74b12bc386441366/lua/easychat/chathud.lua#L608-L611

One way to handle tabs is to separate text in tab-only parts and tab-less parts. When you find tab-only part, you don't need to render that part, just render next (tab-less) part on position round(start_of_tabs + tab_count * tab_size, tab_size). Note that you can't just use math.Round here, you need

local function round(num, roundval) return math.Round(num / roundval) * roundval end

[Earu]

It's not the surface library, the chat hud renders tabulations properly, it stems from the chatbox UI components