Originally Posted by masijade

There is no "columns" There are tab sizes, but those only apply to the current session (also saved in preferences but only for the current user), so that doesn't help as the next person/viewer/editor won't have the same settings.

You best bet is, if your good at regex, to use search and replace to add in spaces. Even better, is to modify whatever "writes" the data to do that. Anyway, for vi, here:

http://www.cs.fsu.edu/general/vimanual.html