Tab Spacing in Text Web Part

Question

Hi,&nbsp;I have a what seems a very simple question that I just can not find a solution.&nbsp;I am populating a large SharePoint site with the need for lots of 'Tab Spacing', for example:&nbsp;1.5l &nbsp; General Arrangement - Deck 101.5m &nbsp; General Arrangement - Deck 111.5n &nbsp; General Arrangement - Deck 12&nbsp;As you can see the alignment is dictated by the font width in this case, I have tried monospaced fonts and populating the content in tables, but both are not suitable for the project I am working on.&nbsp;Am I missing an obvious way to add a simple Tab Spacing?&nbsp;Thanks in advance.&nbsp;

tristan999 · Answer

Unfortunately, this is a limit with the Text web part. Including what you are trying to accomplish (high-level) might be a good idea since other solutions might be more suitable than the text web part, i.e., is there a particular use case for using lots of tabs requirement?

nickf76 · Answer

Hi Tristan999&nbsp;, thank you for your reply.Thanks for clearing this up for me. We are performing a feasibility test to see if SharePoint is a viable option to host online versions of our Technical Manuals. These manuals make extensive use of tabbed data sets which we have historically provided to our users through PDF documents.We intend to upload these PDF documents as well so that our users can download them as they are too large in file size to view conveniently online.&nbsp;Is there another web part that is more suitible?

tristan999 · Answer

So, to make sure I understand what you wrote correctly:

Problem:

You have large PDF documents which contain tabbed data sets that you want to upload to SharePoint and want to use document previews to prevent unnecessary download of files. You found that large PDF files could not be previewed through SharePoint during your proof-of-concept. So, you decided to investigate whether web parts can be used in place of the preview. You looked at the web parts and identified a potential solution using the Text Web Part. Unfortunately, the Text Web Part has limited formatting capabilities.

Additional questions for your consideration:

1. What is the biggest PDF File that you have today? Do you see a foreseeable size increase in the future?
2. In the scenario where you want to copy the contents of PDF files to the text web part. Are you copying the entire content of a PDF to the Text Web Part?
3. What happens in a scenario when there are updates to a technical manual? Were you planning to manually update the text web part each time technical manuals are updated?

Something you may want to look at:

https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/document-cloud/help/office365-configuring-sharepoint-onedrive.html

nickf76 · Answer

Hi Tristan999, Historically, we put our documents together using Adobe InDesign, print out hard copies and export PDF versions for convenience. The documents are full of technical drawings and images, are approximately 700-1000 pages and can be as large as 250mb.So for, the uploading and document management of PDFs in SharePoint are not causing an issue, it seems straight forward to store them and provide download links for the end user's convenience to view them off-line. But the problem is when trying to view them through a web part such as "File and Media'. It works, but unfortunately not good enough as far as I can work out.It is possible that the size of our PDF files will increase over time although we do try to keep them as small as possible. eg, instead of using bitmap images, our house style is mainly vector graphic and we have a large team who create these drawings. These vector drawing play a big part in keeping overall file size to a minimum.We do have a system for updates in place. As it stands, there would not be much if any difference in our processing time to update a web part instead of the original InDesign files and republishing them. Our version control is managed separate to the documents themselves (for better or worse).Thank you for the adobe document cloud link, I have not considered or seen how this can be incorporated into SharePoint. I've started the process, but need to wait for admin to approve part of the process (likely Monday morning), I am only SharePoint Admin.

svensieverding · Answer

Hi&nbsp;nickf76&nbsp;why exactly are tables not suitable?Are tables too complicated to create or do you have an example where a table does not work?Alternatively, you could try the markdown webpart and enter your documentation as markdownBest Regards,SvenPS:Markdown contains all the formatting instructions in the text itself, so for example thisThis is **bold** textresults in&nbsp;"This is bold text"Perhaps there is an option in Adobe Indesign or somewhere else in your publishing process to export the whole documentation as markdown. Then you can just copy&amp;paste it into this webpart.&nbsp;

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Tab Spacing in Text Web Part

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