Tabit is a command line program designed to scan a text file and convert multiple spaces to an equivalent number of tabs to maintain the formatting, assuming fixed width fonts. It takes an input file of plain ASCII text and converts multiple spaces into tabs based on tab stops every n columns. The tab width n defaults to 8 but can be set on the command line to any value between 2 and 32.
Examples: TABIT 6 < FILE1.TXT > FILE2.TXT
or: TYPE FILE1.TXT | TABIT 6 > FILE2.TXT
These commands take an input file FILE1.TXT and produce an output file FILE2.TXT with spaces contracted to tabs based on six character columns.