JTextPane in RC2 no longer honors tabs.  They
worked with Swing 1.1 beta 3.

After debugging this, I noticed the following
comment in LabelView.java:

REMIND(bcb) not yet ready for tab support.

Tab support was removed??
(Review ID: 42989)
======================================================================

N/A

The LabelView rewrite that uses the 1.2 Java2D didn't have tabs implemented.
The actual file built for 1.2 was LabelView2D.java which ended up as 
LabelView in a classfile after passing through munge.  Personally I really
disliked this situation and felt that as much code as possible should be
shared.  For the kestrel release, glyph rendering is done with a dynamically
loaded plug-in that is different for 1.1 and 1.2, and the LabelView class is
the same under both 1.1 and 1.2.  Munge is no longer used.  A test case for
this is to type tabs in Stylepad.
 xxxxx@xxxxx  1999-03-31

I noticed that when I tried to programmatically insert text with tabs into a
JTextPane (and yes, I did also set a logical style with tabs), that the tabs
were ignored.  I would really like to see this fixed.

It really hurts to experience that a essential part
of text-presentation and -processing is no more
available on the newest and most advanced software-
platform.
All of my sources build on the swing 1.x-classes
JTextPane and JEditorPane canīt be used in Java 2.
When will this be fixed?

When will this be available as I really need this.

This is a substantial oversight.  It makes JDK 1.2.2 much less useful
for text processing.

in fact, the tabs are not ignored...they are just not shown 
on the textpane...if you do a getText() and print it onto 
the dos prompt, you will see the tabs where u inserted 
them...