A tabstop on a typewriter is a location where the carriage movement is halted by mechanical gears. Tabstops are set manually, and pressing the tab key causes the carriage to go to the next tabstop. Mechanical desktop typewriters, such as this Underwood Five, were long time standards of government agencies, newsrooms, and sales offices. ... This article is about the use of the term Tab in computing. ...

Modern word processors generalize this concept by offering tabstops that have an alignment attribute and cause the text to be automatically aligned at left, at right or center of the tabstop itself. Such tabstops are paragraph-specific properties and can be moved to a different location in any moment, or even removed. A word processor (also more formally known as a document preparation system) is a computer application used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort of viewable or printed material. ... A pilcrow is used to indicate a paragraph. ...

Tab stop A position you set for placing and aligning text on a page. Microsoft Word has five kinds of tab stops.

Left text extends to the right from the tab stop. Center Tab button Center text is centered at the tab stop. Right text extends to the left from the tab stop until the tab's space is filled, and then the text extends to the right. Decimal text before the decimal point extends to the left, and text after the decimal point extends to the right. Places a vertical line at the specified position for each line in a document.

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