I am well aware that you cannot simply type a tab character into a
text field because of the focus event. This post has nothing to do
with that. I found a lot of questions/answers to that while searching
for my problem on this group. Thanks for your patience upfront. I
just want to make that clear, so I don't get a bunch of quick
responses saying "you can't type a tab character into a text field".

Anyway, we have a couple Access databases that we copy/paste chunks of
text into and sometimes that text does contain tab characters. And up
until now (and I mean for the last 5 years or more), this has never
been a problem. The tab character would simply be displayed as a
little black vertical box or something. You could actually see the
character and editing working fine if you wanted to deleted or edit
the around it, etc.

However.. I just introduced a recent bug, where any line of text that
does contain a tab character gets screwed up when I'm editing that
line of text. By screwed up I mean, the caret position is not aligned
between characters - it actually appears directly *in the middle* of
some characters, and thus if you backspace, it is not clear which
character you are editing. Also the textfield is showing *half* of
the character you just deleted.

It's as if the existence of the tab character now throws off the caret
position - which probably has something to do with the fact that you
can't see it anymore either.

Last update, I did do a fair amount of resizing of form elements and
moving stuff around. Maybe that caused the text fields to shrink
slightly and they are not on fixed character bounds or something,
resulting in some characters not displaying properly? Or should I use
a different font? Or is the problem more serious, like a corruption
issue?

This only seems to happen on lines that have a tab character inserted
on the line. And the editing is only screwed up after the tab
character's position in the line.

Access 2003 (SP3) on Windows XP
Part of Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003

I just wanted to add that we found this problem is machine specific.
So it's nothing to do with the Access database/file itself, but rather
the machine viewing it.

We believe this may have something to do with adding the support for
east-asian language files through Regional Language Options in control
panel (or removing some that were on this machine previously). We've
yet to track this down, but this is the only machine that has the
problem of not being able to view the tabs character anymore and other
related problems as described in my original post.




On Mar 12, 10:14 am, occor... (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote: