It's a poor choice of words. When you print to a file you're telling your computer to take all the instructions that your printer would get if you really printed your document and shove them into a file. It'll save them here for eternity, if you wish, or you can send them to someone with a better printer than yours, like a print shop, and print them there. The language these instructions are stored in is called PostScript . It was invented by Adobe.
PostScript instructions are only possible for certain printers, like high-end laserwriters.
Inkjet printers normally cannot read or be used to generate PostScript files. The word 'tab' is ambiguous. A tab character - tells the text actually to jump. To the next tap stop. A tab stop is a marker on the ruler that tells where the text should line up.