Evolution puts 4 spaces instead of tab when composing

Question

I'm running Fedora 15 and Evolution 3.0.2

When composing a message in evolution I get strange tab behavior. It seems when you press tab it just puts 4 spaces regardless of how many chars are in front of it, Meaning tabs don't vertically line up such as when used in gedit. see pics for comparison.

Bit annoying as I like to use tabs, does anyone know a way to fix this? I've had a look through the preferences and don't see a mention of them.

Answer 1

The problem has nothing to do with which application you're using and everything to do with the font they're using. Evolution is using a proportional font, which means that every character is not the same width, so it's difficult to line things up properly. For instance, this example uses the proportional font DejaVu Sans:

gedit by default uses a nonproportional, or monospaced font. In such fonts, every character is exactly the same width so text lines up easily. This example has the exact same text in the exact same editor, only using the monospaced DejaVu Sans Mono font instead:

So, to get tabs to line up properly, just switch it to use a monospaced font instead. You can change this per message using the tools above the body editor or for every message in Evolution's configuration.