Text::Tabs will do the same as my example, it will replace the tabs with a fixed amount of spaces but it will not consider the spaces in between the two strings. If you make a tab it can contain one time 2 spaces, another time it contains 5 spaces, .... so if you replace the tabs with a fixed amount of spaces the positioning will be scrambled. No collumn effect anymore. So to make it work you first would have to check the amount of spaces between the two strings and then replace the tab with the amount of spaces it was representing. Sorry the Text::Tabs is working fine. It was a proportional font that was all the time giving the bad result and giving the impression that the spaces were incorrect. It is sometimes in a detail.

Text::Tabs will do the same as my example, it will replace the tabs with a fixed amount of spaces but it will not consider the spaces in between the two strings.

i disagree. from the description in the Text::Tabs pod:

Text::Tabs does about what the unix utilities expand(1) and unexpand(1) do. Given a line with tabs in it, expand will replace the tabs with the appropriate number of spaces. Given a line with or without tabs in it, unexpand will add tabs when it can save bytes by doing so. Invisible compression with plain ascii!

here's an example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
require 5.006_001;
use strict;
use warnings;
$|++;

use Text::Tabs;
my $tabstop = 8;

my $text = "12345678901234567890\n\thi\tbye";
print $text,$/,length $text,$/;
my $newtext = expand($text)
print $newtext, $/,length $newtext,$/;
__END__
## prints
12345678901234567890
        hi      bye
28
12345678901234567890
        hi      bye
40
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...unless i'm missing something

~Particle *accelerates*

You are right, it should work. However with me it is not working and I guess this is a bug or something else in the listbox module of Tk. Below you can find an example using your example were it comes out bad in the listbox.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Tk;
$|++;

my $W;
my $c;
my $lab;
my @newtext;

use Text::Tabs;
my $tabstop = 8;

my $text = "Shape:r59\tX-loc:9.77\tY-loc:5.608";
my $text1 = "Shape:r59\tX-loc:9.8819\tY-loc:0";
push @newtext,($text,$text1);


my @newtext = expand(@newtext);

$c = initCanvas4();

sub initCanvas4
{
$W = MainWindow->new;
$W->title("Fiducial Information");
$W->iconname('Fiducial Information');
my $canv = $W->Canvas(qw/-relief sunken -relief flat -bd 0 -width 512 
+-height 350 -background SlateGray3/);
$canv->pack; 
return $canv;
}


# Create a listbox with the contents of the directory.                
+ 
my $ent = $c->Scrolled(qw/Listbox -setgrid 1 -height 3 -width 40 -scro
+llbars e -selectmode single/);
    for(@{newtext})
    {
    $ent->insert(0, "$_");
    }
 #$ent->bind('<Double-Button-1>',
 #    sub {
 #       $file_selected = $ent->get('active');
#
 #   }

$c->createWindow('10p 80p',
        -window => $lab,
        -anchor => 'nw'
        );
  
$c->createWindow('10p 95p',
        -window => $ent,
        -anchor => 'nw'
        );

MainLoop;
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