Hello-
Is there a way to convert Autoindents in Scrivener to Tabs?
I’ve got a large document that I’m exporting out into Word for publishing. I’m not sure why this happened, but some chapters have auto-indent style indentations, whereas in other ones I used the Tab to create an indentation.
Regardless, I have a bit of a mess and need to convert all AutoIndents to Tabs in 50 or so chapters/documents. Is this possible?
I would recommend stripping tabs (Format -> Convert -> Strip Leading Tabs), and then using the Compile command to normalize indents.
Why are indents better than tabs? Because a lot of formats (including Word, depending on the template) will auto-indent paragraphs anyway, and so you’ll end up with double indentation if there’s already a tab.
Katherine
Thanks Katherine-
I didn’t realize the Word would also auto-indent paragraphs. The main problem I was having was the inconsistency. Some chapters were auto’d and others were not. I would prefer to use only tabs. The auto-indent stuff messes with my brain when I select “Show Invisibles” and there is nothing at the beginning of a paragraph to indicate why it is being auto-indented. Seems like that would be an invisible character as well to show you why there’s a space there.
Is there a way to turn Auto-Indent off completely so that Scrivener never does it? Or is that something associated with a text preset? That might have been where I got in trouble in the first place (through trying to set my own custom text preset).
Regardless, I did do a Find and Replace over each chapter and replaced any P (paragraph) character with a P > (paragraph tab) set of characters. That seemed to work for now.
Many thanks!
Format -> Indents -> Tabs and Indents will let you change the first line indent. This is a per paragraph setting, so it can easily be changed by a preset or manually. If you’re seeing inconsistent behavior that’s probably why.
Katherine