Tab Position

[Robert]

Hi,

I am new to VBA in Word. Would anyone be able to answer
this:

If I have two tabs and I am at the position starting at
the second tab, how can I determine in VBA if there is
anything at the first tab on the next line. For example:

Tab 1 Tab 2
Line 1 Some Text Some other text
Line 2 Yet more text

If there is a paragraph mark at the end of "Some other
text" on Line 1, when I return to the start of the next
line, how can I determine if there is anything at Tab 1
for the second line?

I hope I am explaining this clear enough! Any help would
be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Jonathan West]

Hi Robert,

You can check to see whether there are two consecutive Tab characters in
that paragraph. If there are, then there is no text at Tab 1.

 

[Robert]

Thanks Jonathan for the suggestion, but that does not seem
to work and this is getting very frustrating trying to
figure out.

When I start at the very end of each line preceding each
of the (2)examples below, there is (1) chr(13) for a
paragraph mark and (2) chr(9) for a tab mark. But on line
one, you only go to the beginning of the line and with
line 2 you go over to the Tab2 position. I am guessing
that the tab must have some kind of properties that tells
Word to go over to the tab2 position, but darn if I know
what it is.

If anyone could offer any suggestions, it would be greatly
appreciated!

Tab 1 Tab 2

 

[Jonathan West]

Hi Robert,

Where the tabs move the cursor to is defined by the TabStops collection of
the Paragraph or ParagraphFormat object. The TabStops collection is a
collection of TabStop objects. Each Tabstop object has several properties,
including a Position property, which indicates the position of the tabstop
in points relative to the left margin (72 points = 1 inch).

Therefore, the following line of code will display the position in
centimeters of the first tab of the currently selected paragraph

MsgBox "First tabstop is at " & _
PointstoCentimeters(Selection.Paragraphs(1).TabStops(1).Position) & "
cm"

If you know where you think tab 1 ought to be, you can compare its position
with that of the actual first tab of a paragraph, and so work out which
column the text after the first tab is appearing in.