100% reproducible with qt 4.6.1 and 4.6.2 test case: just create a form with QWebView and try ui->webView->setHtml("<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd\">" "<html><body><pre>hello my fine world</pre></body></html>"); notice tabs between words and "pre". i also tried various values for white-space css attribute but tabs are always spaces. just a quick test: open any source hosting site (googlecode for example) with arora browser and browse code (here for example http://code.google.com/p/psi-dev/source/browse/trunk/patches/1010-psi-fix-alt%2BN-crash.diff?spec=svn1885&r=1885 )
it seems bugzilla translated my tabs into number of spaces. so type them manually in code. btw fyi bug is not reproducible with not qt webkit. so chromium a epiphany work fine.
Please follow the QtWebKit bug reporting guidelines when reporting bugs. See http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/QtWebKitBugs Specifically: - The 'QtWebKit' component should be used for bugs/features in the public QtWebKit API layer, not to signify that the bug is specific to the Qt port of WebKit http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/QtWebKitBugs#Component
Confirmed on trunk. The difference comparing http://code.google.com/p/psi-dev/source/browse/trunk/patches/1010-psi-fix-alt%2BN-crash.diff?spec=svn1885&r=1885 on Chromium and QtTestBrowser is pretty striking. The tab isn't being converted a space - it's a tab but it is only rendered to the width of a space.
This issue doesn't seem fixed to me. I tried Arora with Qt 4.8.6 and it's still showing tabs at the width of spaces.
Regarding my previous comment: It works for me now in Qt 5+. Thanks!