@Verbatim bug ????

[David Middleton]

Dear all

I have a query about @Verbatim.  I havn't looked into the sed 
underpinnings but from my reading of the users guide I would
consider this a "bug".

If I run the following file through lout (v3.06 under solaris 2.4)

@SysInclude { doc }
@Doc @Text @Begin

{ Courier Base } @Font @Verbatim {
        Sentence with   tabs
        Sentence with   spaces
}
@End @Text

then I get the error:

     1,1: character "\011" omitted (it has no glyph in font Courier Base)

(the original file has tabs before "Sentence" and "tabs" in the first line
- it may not have after it's been through various mailers!).

The first tab in the first line is removed (so the two lines are no
longer indented the same amount) and the second is treated as a space.

Should @Verbatim not preserve tabs ?  If the answere is no, then can
anyone suggest how to cope with the following:

I maintain several tab-delimited files with various bits of information.
The lines often get very long, which is not a problem when I view them
on screen, but occasionally I want a printout.  If I just spool it to
the printer and rely on the standard filters then the long lines cause 
problems.  What I wanted to do with lout was just wrap the file in
an @Verbatim, and use a few other lout commands to scale and rotate the
text so one line fits across a landscape page.  The way @Verbatim
currently treats tabs prevents this.  I don't especially want to 
convert the files to lout tables as the main aim is for the source file to 
remain easily readable on screen.

Thanks for listening

David