The problem today is that various editors allow you to configure tab size. If you configure editor to put spaces in when tabbing, you always have control over what you see. If you configure editor to put in tabs, change to another editor or give to a different person using a different tab size and the format changes dramatically.

I regular deal with code from a specific project, in which different files can use different tab sizes as well as a mixture of tabs and spaces (dependent on who has worked on the files). As a matter of course, I set the tab size to 8 for any file that has tabs and convert to spaces before setting my tab size back to my preferred size.

One subsidiary task I have for this project is to modify the UI editor for the project to handle the conversion of spaces and tabs according to your preferences. While saving any system files in the project lead's preferred style.