CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-docs
jkdev
jkdev

Reputation: 11748

Prevent automatic tab insertion or conversion of spaces to tabs

Google Docs has a "feature" that sometimes converts four spaces to one tab.

Copying and pasting text does not solve this problem, because the spaces in that text are converted to tabs automatically.

Is there a way to turn this off?

Upvotes: 24

Views: 7523

Answers (5)

Kache
Kache

Reputation: 16727

Click-dragging text seems to work, may depend on the OS/application though.

Get your text into an application that supports dragging selected text, e.g. another webpage with a plain textarea. Then select and drag into Google Docs.

Upvotes: 3

Philip Clarke
Philip Clarke

Reputation: 735

i use cmd+shift+v (edit -> paste without formatting) to paste.
The spaces are not converted to tabs.

Upvotes: 1

micans
micans

Reputation: 1116

The approach that caused me the least headaches was to replace all spaces by another character (say underscore) in the original text, copy/paste it, then replace the underscore using find+replace. This was in Google slides.

Upvotes: 7

Dustin Soodak
Dustin Soodak

Reputation: 583

I did find one solution: there is a Chrome plugin called "Drive Notepad" which edits google drive files and has an option "Tabs: hard"

Upvotes: 1

zero-day
zero-day

Reputation: 402

No way to turn of that I know of. So annoying.

You can work-around using normal copy-paste, then a search-and-replace.

  1. Copy-Paste you content into the Google Doc
  2. In a text-editor, enter a tab character then cut it to your clipboard
  3. Back in Google Docs, highlight the content you wish to fix
  4. Hit Ctrl + H to open Find and replace dialogue
  5. Paste the tab character into the Find field
  6. Insert 4 space characters into the Replace with field
  7. Click Replace all

Upvotes: 18

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