What is a vertical tab

Question

What was the original historical use of the vertical tab character   v in the C language  ASCII 11    Did it ever have a key on a keyboard  How did someone generate it   Is there any language or system still in use today where the vertical tab character does something interesting and useful

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I have found that the VT char is used in pptx text boxes at the end of each line shown in the box in oder to adjust the text to the size of the box  It seems to be automatically generated by powerpoint  not introduced by the user  in order to move the text to the next line and fix the complete text block to the text box  In the example below  in the position of       This is a text    inside a text box

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It was used during the typewriter era to move down a page to the next vertical stop  typically spaced 6 lines apart  much the same way horizontal tabs move along a line by 8 characters    In modern day settings  the vt is of very little  if any  significance

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In the medical industry  VT is used as the start of frame character in the MLLP LLP HLLP protocols that are used to frame HL-7 data  which has been a standard for medical exchange since the late 80s and is still in wide use

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Vertical tab was used to speed up printer vertical movement   Some printers used special tab belts with various tab spots   This helped align content on forms   VT to header space  fill in header  VT to body area  fill in lines  VT to form footer   Generally it was coded in the program as a character constant  From the keyboard  it would be CTRL-K    I don t believe anyone would have a reason to use it any more   Most forms are generated in a printer control language like postscript    Talvi Wilson noted it used in python   v       print  hello vworld     Output   hello      world   The above output appears to result in the default vertical size being one line   I have tested with perl   013  and the same output occurs  This could be used to do   line feed without a carriage return on devices with convert linefeed to carriage-return   linefeed

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similar to R0byn s experience  i was experimenting with a Powerpoint slide presentation and dumped out the main body of text on the slide  finding that all the places where one would typically find carriage return  ASCII 13 0x0d  M  or line feed new line  ASCII 10 0x0a  J  characters  it uses vertical tab  ASCII 11 0x0b  K  instead  presumably for the exact reason that dan04 described above for Word  to serve as a  newline  while staying within the same paragraph  good question though as i totally thought this character would be as useless as a teletype terminal today

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The ASCII vertical tab   x0B is still used in some databases and file formats as a new line WITHIN a field  For example    In the  mer file format to allow new lines within a data field  FileMaker databases can use vertical tabs as a linefeed  see https   support microsoft com en-gb kb 59096

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Microsoft Word uses VT as a line separator in order to distinguish it from the normal new line function  which is used as a paragraph separator

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I believe it s still being used  not sure exactly  There might be even a key combination of it   As English is written Left to Right  Arabic Right to Left  there are languages in world that are also written top to bottom  In that case a vertical tab might be useful same as the horizontal tab is used for English text   I tried searching  but couldn t find anything useful yet

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A vertical tab was the opposite of a line feed i e  it went upwards by one line   It had nothing to do with tab positions   If you want to prove this  try it on an RS232 terminal

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I just found the VT char in a  pptx document at several places within a table element  But no clue about how it was inserted

[character-encoding] What is a vertical tab?

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