Formatting Syntax

You can indent or outdent selected lines of syntax and you can automatically indent selections so that the syntax is formatted in a manner similar to syntax pasted from a dialog box.

• The default indent is four spaces and applies to indenting selected lines of syntax as well as to automatic indentation. You can change the indent size from the Syntax Editor tab in the Options dialog box.
• Note that using the Tab key in the Syntax Editor does not insert a tab character. It inserts a space.

To indent text

1. Select the text or position the cursor on a single line that you want to indent.
2. From the menus choose:

   Tools > Indent Syntax > Indent

You can also indent a selection or line by pressing the Tab key.

To outdent text

1. Select the text or position the cursor on a single line that you want to outdent.
2. From the menus choose:

   Tools > Indent Syntax > Outdent

To automatically indent text

1. Select the text.
2. From the menus choose:

   Tools > Indent Syntax > Auto Indent

When you automatically indent text, any existing indentation is removed and replaced with the automatically generated indents. Note that automatically indenting code within a BEGIN PROGRAM block may break the code if it depends on specific indentation to function, such as Python code containing loops and conditional blocks.

Syntax formatted with the auto-indent feature may not run in batch mode. For example, auto-indenting an INPUT PROGRAM-END INPUT PROGRAM, LOOP-END LOOP, DO IF-END IF or DO REPEAT-END REPEAT block will cause the syntax to fail in batch mode because commands in the block will be indented and will not start in column 1 as required for batch mode. You can, however, use the -i switch in batch mode to force the Batch Facility to use interactive syntax rules. See the topic Syntax Rules for more information.