I’m not sure of the right terminology, but here’s what I saw, and what I’d like to do.
I imported a story into Scrivener from Word. I generated a formatted short story from it. I opened the resulting RTF in Word before submitting, and noted that many, but not all of my paragraph indentations also had a tab character after them. For example:
[indent]“Behold your defeat, slimy dog!” said the space pirate.
[tab]The dog wagged its tail.
[indent]The space pirate sighed.
I searched and replaced the tabs in Word and submitted my story. However, I’d like to fix the master copy in Scrivener. I found that I could alt-tab in the Scivener’s find field and search for all the tabs. However, I don’t know what to replace the tab with so that the indentation is not lost… Could anyone share with me the correct alt-whatever character to get an indentation?
That’s a tricky one because there is no magic character that controls indent. Those are actually ruler styles, and there is no keyboard character that would adjust them that you could use in a Search and Replace context. Right off the top of my head, the easiest method I can think of would be to copy a ruler style from a fixed paragraph (Cmd-Ctrl-C), and then paste that ruler style one-by-one. Search for tabs, use Cmd-G, and Cmd-Ctrl-V to paste ruler style (ignoring the tab for the moment). I’d recommend Edit Scrivenings for this operation, so you don’t have to keep flipping through to different documents in the Binder. Then once that has all been done throughout the entire project, search and replace all tabs with nothing.
Depending on how many cases there are like this, that could end up being a lot of work, more than you’d like to entertain. If there are thousands of cases, it might actually be easier to go the other direction. Get things fixed in Word and then import that version back into the Binder and split it back up. Depending on how much extra information your documents have in Scrivener (think keywords, document notes, synopsis, references, etc), that might not be a good option to take.
Fortunately this shouldn’t be a problem for future projects. It sounds like you had imported this (or parts of it) from another word processor originally, and the project inherited its usage of tabs instead of indents. Scrivener doesn’t work this way on its own, which is why I’m guessing that is what happened.
And of course, depending on the stage of completion you might just choose to forget it. A lot of people stop working in Scrivener once they’ve compiled and sent out their manuscript. If you do anticipate lots of revisions and want to stick with Scrivener though, that might not yet be a good option.
There is one other potential alternative to all of this that is automated, but it would depend on your comfort level at the technical level. Strictly speaking all of the components of your draft are RTFD files, and can thus be manipulated with UNIX scripts that look for a specific code pattern (a tab) and replace them with another pattern (an indent). This is potentially something that would take a few hours to sort out though, and would involve some trial and error working on duplicates (because some of those trials might very well blow everything up).
I took an approach close to your first suggestion. I highlighted the whole doc, and reset the indentation on the ruler so that all highlighted paragraphs were affected. The indented+tabbed paragraphs now looked double indented. I then searched and replaced the tabs. Voila.