tabbing commands ¶The best overall description of the tabbing environment commands we know is in Leslie Lamport’s original reference manual, section C.10.1 of \LaTeX: A Document Preparation System. A summary of the commands follows.
In general, at any point the tabbing environment has a
current tab stop pattern: a sequence of n > 0 tab
stops, numbered 0, 1, etc. Each tab stop creates a corresponding
column. Tab stop 0 is always the left margin, defined by the
enclosing environment. Tab stop number i is set if it is
assigned a horizontal position on the page. Tab stop
number i can only be set if all the stops 0, …,
i-1 have already been set; normally later stops are to the
right of earlier ones.
By default any text typeset in a tabbing environment is typeset
ragged right and left-aligned on the current tab stop. Typesetting is
done in LR mode (see Modes).
The following commands can be used inside a tabbing environment.
They are all fragile (see \protect).
\\ (tabbing) ¶End a tabbed line and typeset it.
\= (tabbing) ¶Set a tab stop at the current position.
\> (tabbing) ¶Advance to the next tab stop.
\+ (tabbing) ¶Move the left margin of the next and all the following commands one tab stop to the right, beginning a tabbed line if necessary.
\< (tabbing) ¶Put following text to the left of the local margin (without changing
the margin). Can only be used at the start of a line, and a
preceding line must have used \+.
\- (tabbing) ¶Move the left margin of the next and all following lines one tab stop
to the left (undoing one \+). Does not change the current line.
\' (tabbing) ¶Move everything in the current column so far, i.e., everything from
the most recent \>, \<, \', \\, or
\kill command, to the previous column and aligned to the right,
flush against the current column’s tab stop.
\` (tabbing) ¶Move all the text following, up to the \\ or
\end{tabbing} command that ends the line, to the right margin
of the tabbing environment. There must be no \> or
\' command between the \` and the \\ or
\end{tabbing} command that ends the line.
This allows you to put text flush right against any tab stop, including tab stop 0. However, it can’t move text to the right of the last column because there’s no tab stop there.
\a (tabbing) ¶In a tabbing environment, the commands \=, \' and
\` do not produce accents as usual (see Accents). Instead,
use the commands \a=, \a' and \a`.
\kill (tabbing) ¶Sets tab stops without producing text. Works just like \\ except
that it throws away the current line instead of producing output for it.
Any \=, \+ or \- commands in that line remain in
effect.
\poptabs ¶Restores the tab stop positions saved by the last \pushtabs.
\pushtabs ¶Saves all current tab stop positions. Useful for temporarily changing
tab stop positions in the middle of a tabbing environment.
\tabbingsep ¶Distance of the text moved by \' to left of current tab stop;
its default value is \labelsep (see list labelsep).