Tabbing the text

[EvilDragon]

I need some help again

How can I achieve Tsukihime-style text tabbing like this:

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This...
         Is...
               Really...
                          Strange!

Adding spaces in say doesn't seem to do the trick the way it should, nor would I like to have a different character for every tabstop. Isn't there a character like \n that can tab a number of whitespace characters in? Also, non-monospaced font is in question, if it means anything to you.

[PyTom]

We don't support tabbing directly. By default, Ren'Py compresses runs of whitespace into single spaces, but you can backslash escape them to fix that.

"No spaces\n
\ \ \ \ Four Spaces\n
\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ Eight spaces\n
\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ etc."

[EvilDragon]

This does the trick, thanks!

[herenvardo]

I saw this thread just now and I want to make a suggestion: if you only need the tabing on one or two statements, escaping spaces directly might be fine; but if you're doing it too often it might render your code almost unreadable. In such case, my custom text tag parser (click this link to find it) could enable a more readable approach... if you want to try it, you should include the module (the ctextags.rpym file) in your game directory, then add something like this in an init block:

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init:
    python:
        renpy.load_module("ctextags") # Loads the Custom Text Tags module
        def tab(arg, text): # This function will handle the custom {tab=something} tag
            return " " * int(arg)
        custom_text_tags["tab"] = (False, tab) # "Registers" the function, pairing it with the "{tab}" tag
        config.say_menu_text_filter = cttfilter # Kindly asks Ren'py to parse our custom tags on every say and menu statement

Then, a code like PyTom's example

"No spaces\n
\ \ \ \ Four Spaces\n
\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ Eight spaces\n
\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ etc."

would become:

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"No spaces\n
{tab=4}Four Spaces\n
{tab=8}Eight spaces\n
{tab=12}etc."

In both cases, the output would be something like this:

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No spaces
    Four Spaces
        Eight spaces
            etc.

As a side note I'd like you to notice that the tab() function does not escape the spaces: doing so was causing the backslashes to appear on the screen; so I guessed that config.say_menu_text_filter is called after the escapes are replaced... fortunatelly, by when it's called whitespace is already trimmed, so the spaces introduced by the function won't be trimmed again
Also, I'd like to mention that this is exactly the kind of task my module is aimed to handle.
Finally, I've to insist that whether directly escaping the spaces in your statements or using a custom tag would be best depends only in how often do you need to tab your text.

[EvilDragon]

Wow, that's a very nifty solution! I was actually wondering how come such a thing isn't already there in ren'py, since \ \ 's would really mess up the reading of the code. Thanks for this, I'll definitely use it a lot!

[monele]

I don't have a precise use for this tag add-on right now, but I know I will at some point so... is it up on the wiki or somewhere easy to find? I don't want to miss it once the threads have been buried in the depth of the forums

[EvilDragon]

I agree, Herenvardo, post this to cookbook!

[herenvardo]

I must say that I was reluctant to add this to the cookbook for licensing reasons (I had good reasons to make the original release under the LGPL). But after some deep thinking about the topic, I realize that the more "relaxed" ren'py license is not much of a problem: the potential abuses I wanted to prevent with the LGPL will simply not happen within the Ren'py community. So, here it is: http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/coo ... _text_tags

[monele]

I'm not sure how posting this in the cookbook changes its license but... in any case, thanks ^_^

[PyTom]

Well, stuff posted to the wiki is contributed under the Ren'Py (MIT) license, so I can distribute it along with Ren'Py. So if you were to post your code there, the licensing would be weird to say the least.

[monele]

Ohh... I didn't know that. In that light, I see how it's a problem ô_o;...