Question regarding the tabs utility plus xterm in FreeBSD

[ash at contact.bg]

Hi everybody,

I would like to ask about the behaviour of the tabs utility in FreeBSD and xterm.

I am the coordinator for Gnome translations in Bulgarian but I have experience
mostly with Fedora and none with FreeBSD.

Some of the translation output that goes to a terminal contains tabs. (ASCII 9 -
Horizontal Tabs).

I found out that FreeBSD contains an implementation of the POSIX tabs utility
which should be able to change tab positions.

I do not have access to a FreeBSD install (much less - one with xterm) and hoped
that someone could help me find out whether it is possible to change the tabs in
a xterm session (or the FreeBSD console) so that when a file containing tabs is
output - the tabs will be spaced differently than the usual default (which at
least at my machine is 8 spaces)

Kind regards:
al_shopov