# Pad

This statement is used to pad the contents of a track or named variable. There are two functions.

You can remove tab characters replacing them with spaces. You specify if you are using tab stops at 8 or 4 characters. The functionality always normalizes line terminators and removes control characters. A source string containing multiple lines will be processed properly.

You can justify the text. You can choose left, middle or right justification, padding the text to a specified number of characters. If the length resolves to be zero at runtime, no justification will occur. You can specify the string to be used to fill unoccupied space. If the fill string resolves to be empty, a space will be assumed. If the text string is longer than the specified number of characters, you can optionally truncate the text to the desired length. Note in order to avoid potentially harmful results, the desired length is limited to 10000 characters. If your specified length exceeds 10000, it will be lowered to 10000 and truncate will be disabled.

All text fields may contain any of the escape sequences described in Escape Sequences. When run stepwise, escape sequences are only evaluated once.