What is a vertical tab?

Question

What was the original historical use of the vertical tab character (\v in the C language, ASCII 11)?

Did it ever have a key on a keyboard? How did someone generate it?

Is there any language or system still in use today where the vertical tab character does something interesting and useful?

Answer 1

I have found that the VT char is used in pptx text boxes at the end of each line shown in the box in oder to adjust the text to the size of the box. It seems to be automatically generated by powerpoint (not introduced by the user) in order to move the text to the next line and fix the complete text block to the text box. In the example below, in the position of §:

"This is a text §
inside a text box"

Answer 2

similar to R0byn's experience, i was experimenting with a Powerpoint slide presentation and dumped out the main body of text on the slide, finding that all the places where one would typically find carriage return (ASCII 13/0x0d/^M) or line feed/new line (ASCII 10/0x0a/^J) characters, it uses vertical tab (ASCII 11/0x0b/^K) instead, presumably for the exact reason that dan04 described above for Word: to serve as a "newline" while staying within the same paragraph. good question though as i totally thought this character would be as useless as a teletype terminal today.

Answer 3

I just found the VT char in a .pptx document at several places within a table element. But no clue about how it was inserted.

Answer 4

A vertical tab was the opposite of a line feed i.e. it went upwards by one line. It had nothing to do with tab positions. If you want to prove this, try it on an RS232 terminal.