MS Word - setting indents vs. tabs

[Sac Arrow]

Okay this is frustrating.

So I have a document which has lots of paragraphs, and lots of dialogue. I do first line indents on my paragraphs, as it is fiction work.

When I upload it in to Kindle format, roughly half the paragraphs have indents, and half have double indents. After some research, I learned that a) you can display the tab characters, and b) Word either sets a tab or an indent, depending on the point of insertion.

Well I displayed the tab characters, and low and behold, they were the smoking gun. Some paragraphs are indents, and some are tabs. There appears to be no rime or reason for the switch between the two. Kindle already treats a new paragraph as an indent, and any tab characters, which Word does not display as a double indent, show up as a double indent in Kindle.

Since there does not appear to be a character for an indent, replacing the tabs with indents are not as simple as doing a find and replace. There appears to be macro solutions for doing that, but they are complex. So I guess I'm stuck removing them manually for now. I'll have the document edited before I figure out how to code a macro.

So the question is, for you Wordsmiths, is there a way to force Word to only use indents, and not tabs? In the autoformat option, you can force it to use tabs, but not the other way around as far as I can tell.

 

[AggieMike88]

Are you doing the indent like below by changing the top marker of the indent to make it a hanging indent??

 

[Sac Arrow]

Are you doing the indent like below by changing the top marker of the indent to make it a hanging indent??

Yes, it's a hanging indent, but sometimes autoformat treats it as such and sometimes it doesn't. There might be a couple pages formatted properly and several pages littered with tabs, and tabs and indents mixed among pages.

 

[Van Johnston]

Yes, it's a hanging indent, but sometimes autoformat treats it as such and sometimes it doesn't. There might be a couple pages formatted properly and several pages littered with tabs, and tabs and indents mixed among pages.

Maybe you inadvertently have multiple paragraph styles in your doc? Highlight a para you like, then right click the normal para style and select the option to make the normal style what you have highlighted, then select whole doc and select normal style for everything.

Otherwise,

 

[Sac Arrow]

Maybe you inadvertently have multiple paragraph styles in your doc? Highlight a para you like, then right click the normal para style and select the option to make the normal style what you have highlighted, then select whole doc and select normal style for everything.

Otherwise,

I've figured it out. If I let autoformat do the first line indent, I'm fine. If I manually tab it, it may (or may not) put a tab character in there. As long as I leave the tab character display showing, I can control it.

I don't use multiple styles (at least in fiction work.) The only reason I use a style at all is to generate a TOC.

 

[AggieMike88]

So what's the project? The next great American Screenplay?

You said fiction, so maybe "how to successfully pick up burger chicks"?

 

[SCCutler]

All part of why I prefer (STILL) WordPerfect, which is a vastly superior word processor to Word.

 

[Sac Arrow]

All part of why I prefer (STILL) WordPerfect, which is a vastly superior word processor to Word.

Can't really comment as I haven't used Word Perfect since it was still DOS text based.

Word works pretty well for complex formatting (e.g. technical documents) if you know how to use it. I have to use it since it's the standard in my industry. In any case, the preferred Kindle input is a Word document.

 

[Sac Arrow]

Are you doing the indent like below by changing the top marker of the indent to make it a hanging indent??

As a follow up, the solution to the problem (meaning, the repair) turned out to be fairly simple.

1. Do a search and replace to strip out the hidden tab characters. Now the indentation is all funky and half the paragraphs are not indented.

2. Do a "select all" for the entire document and set the first line indent as you suggest. All fixed.

3. Go back and fix the chapter headings. Unless you want them left justified indented. I like center justification, and they will be off center with the indent present.

So basically for future work, ensure that you don't use the tab key at all, and ensure that autoformat does not change from first line indent. Unless you really want the extra indent.