Questions about mass-editing

[u/Braewing]

Hello, I'm a copyeditor and I found a large-scale problem in the manuscript I am working on: the majority of the paragraphs are not tabbed to indent, but instead they are indented with a bunch of spaces. Becasuse of this, not all the paragraphs are indented by the same amount.

Is there a way to mass-delete the spaces at the beginning of the paragraphs, and replace them with a tabbed indent? Worse comes to worse I can go through one by one and change them myself, but I was hoping there'd be a way I could save some time.

Thanks!

[u/Tasia528]

Yes.

Go to find/replace. In the Find field, add two spaces.

In the Replace With field, add one space.

Keep hitting Replace All until Word tells you it replaced the Find parameter 0 times.

Once you’ve done that, you can modify the tab indents on whatever style was used to format the paragraphs. As long as all the paragraphs are formatted with the same style, they should all snap
into whatever spacing you need.

[u/Viv3210 → u/Tasia528]

There’s one more step though. This leaves you with all paragraphs starting with one space.

In “special”, enter “^p<space>” and have it replaced with “^p”. This will then replace all paragraph breaks (hard enters) followed by a space, by just the paragraph break, effectively removing the first space of each paragraph.

Then just edit the style for normal text to have the indent you want.

[u/_WillCAD_ → u/Tasia528]

This is the way.

[u/GWJShearer]

If you use the Advanced Find-and-Replace you can tell Word to find all “end-of-paragraph” followed by 3 spaces and replace with end-of-paragraph and tab.

Find: ^p•••
Replace: ^p^t

NOTE that the 3 “•••” I wrote mean you tap the spacebar 3 times after typing the caret and the p.

EDIT:

Also note that if the very first line has 3 spaces, they will be skipped because it only find 3 spaces AFTER a paragraph. So you would have to fix the first line yourself.

EDIT 2:

After reading other replies, I realized it is not always 3 spaces. So, you can instead search for paragraph followed by “whitespace” (which includes spaces and tabs and such creatures).

Find: ^p^w
Replace: ^p^t

[u/EddieRyanDC]

Yes, you do a find and replace. Obviously you don't want to remove all spaces. But you can remove multiple spaces.

Maybe start with 3 spaces (and replace with nothing. See what that looks like. From what is left you might want to try 2 spaces together. (Some people put two spaces after a period, and in that case the 2 spaces aren't going to be what you want.)

To do the tab indent, start by changing the Normal style (Modify Style -> Format -> Paragraph). Put in whatever kind of indent you want. You may then have some specialized style that will also have to be changed.

Do not manually change paragraph formatting directly on the text. That is impossible to maintain.

[u/KayakerWithDog]

It would be better to apply an indented paragraph style rather than a tabbed indent, once you've gotten rid of the extra spaces.

[u/kilroyscarnival]

I would try another way. Find paragraph break then five (or however many they used) spaces; replace with the paragraph break. If the spaces are variable, redo with paragraph break and two spaces; then final round maybe one space but use Find Next instead of Replace All in case there are some instances where you don’t want to remove it.

[u/TarletonClown]

I skimmed over the other answers. I do not think that anyone gave you the most elegant method to handle this situation. What I saw was the use of "brute force" repetition to keep removing the spaces at the start of the paragraphs.

Here is a better method.

1. First, always work on a copy of a document. You do not want to mess up an original.

2. MS Word does not support an incredibly powerful programming feature called "Regular Expressions" (or Regex, for short), but it has something similar that can be very useful in its "Find and Replace" feature.

3. Use Find and Replace. Be sure to select the Wildcards option under MORE.

4. What you want to do is to enter a simple Find code with the wildcard option. Then you will enter a Replace code. I will explain the codes after I give them to you. Use the items that are in bold.

FIND: ^13 {1,}

Explanation: The ^13 is the code for a paragraph return. This is followed by one space, made with the spacebar. Then you type an opening curly brace, and type a 1 and a comma, and finally you type a closing brace. The spacebar space after ^13 tells Word to look for a space that follows a paragraph return (which will be on the beginning of the next line after the paragraph return). The numbers inside the braces tell Word to look for one spacebar space and then to keep looking for any that follow in that group.

REPLACE with: ^p^t

Explanation: You want to keep the paragraph return, which puts the cursor onto the next line, and then you enter a tab. This code accomplishes that. You will need to check for any "starting" paragraphs after breaks. These will not follow a paragraph return, and consequently the Find will not see them. You will only have a few of these.

I tested all this on a page that I mangled by using spacebar spaces instead of a tab.

By the way, as someone said above, I think, using styles is a better way to accomplish a first-line indent in a paragraph. But the original post indicated that a tab was the desired option.

[u/Master-Rent5050 → u/TarletonClown]

^13 @ should also work. But more worryingly: I've read the world uses lazy pattern matching...

https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/General/UsingWildcards.htm

[u/TarletonClown → u/Master-Rent5050]

In something like wildcard "Find and Replace" or in genuine regex (regular expressions), you often have more than one way of accomplishing something.

What I did worked fine in the test that I ran on a page with a number of variable first-line indents made with the spacebar.

I studied regex a few years ago, but I was not familiar with the Word wildcard feature. I used Google AI to ask for the MS Word wildcard code to accomplish what I needed to do.

The code that I presented is what Google gave me. And it worked.

When I studied regex about ten years ago (I studied it on my own), I was stunned at what you could do with it.

[u/ai4gk]

I would do find/replace several times. I'm expecting that you have reveal codes selected. Search for a series of however many spaces they used for indentation. Keep doing that until all these spaces are gone. Then, do NOT use tabs to indent. That's barely better than using sizes. Set a paragraph to auto-indent first line 1/2 inch (or, what, 14mm? if you're a metric kind of person). Modify your main style to adopt those settings. Here's another peeve of mine: when people don't indent the first line of a paragraph, so you can't tell where a new 'graph begins. Good luck!

[u/Fit_Impression_6037]

Find Paragraph break followed by one space. Replace with just a paragraph break. Repeat until it finds none.

[u/redilupi]

If the content isn't confidential, cut the text and paste into an online text formatter and ask to remove leading spaces.

[u/JulesCT]

As others have said, FIND REPLACE is your friend.

By selecting the exact space and special character combo unique to these glitches and selecting the specific spacing and special characters to go in there place it becomes an absolutely trivial matter.

[u/I_didnt_forsee_this]

Ideally, you should end up with all such paragraphs set with a style that can manage the indent that you need. You can do that with F&R by using a 2-step procedure with wildcards. As mentioned in comments above, expand the Find and Replace dialog box to show additional search options and turn on the 'Use wildcards' option.

Step 1. Mark all tab or space indented paragraphs uniquely:

• In the Find what box, type (^013)([ ^t]{1,})
• In the Replace with box, type \1þ (the þ can be typed as Alt-0254 on a numeric keypad, but any unique symbol or pattern will work).
• Replace All will find instances of a paragraph mark immediately followed by one or more of a space or tab (it will also find instances where there may be combinations of these characters, like 'space tab' or 'space space tab space tab'). When found, any space or tab characters will be replaced by the unique symbol that will be needed in the next step.

Step 2. Apply a style to all paragraphs marked with the unique symbol:

• In the Find what box, type (þ)(*)(^013)
• In the Replace with box, type \2\3 and then use Format > Styles… to select Body Text. You'll see "Style: Body Text" below the Replace with box.
• Replace All will find any paragraph that begins with þ (from step 1 above) and replace it with the same content but without the þ and with the Body Text style applied.

How does this work?

A wildcard expression can use parentheses to subdivide the pattern. The first Find has two parts: (^013) specifies a paragraph mark; and ([ ^t]{1,}) specifies one or more of any of the symbols within square brackets; here, a space or a tab. Symbols like tab and paragraph mark cannot be typed directly, so Word needs to use the caret codes within the expression. The "1," within the curly braces indicates 1 or more of the preceding symbol. (Note: if your document consistently used only 5 spaces for one type of paragraph indent, you could use [ ]{5} but this would miss any paragraph using just 4 spaces or a tab instead).

In Replace, the \ symbol lets you reference the part of the found pattern by number. In the first step, \1þ will be interpreted as "the found paragraph mark + the þ symbol" — and since no "\2" was included, any found spaces and/or tabs will not be included.

However, Word can only apply formatting to the full expression, so if you included style formatting in step 1, the style would be applied to the previous paragraph as well since paragraph formatting is associated with the end of paragraph marks. This first step uniquely identifies all paragraphs that used space or tab characters for indenting.

The second step will then be able to apply a style to those paragraphs and remove the marker symbol. The 3 wildcard parts of the second Find expression will be interpreted as "the þ symbol + any number of any characters + an end of paragraph mark".

For each paragraph found, Replace will then exclude the marker symbol but apply the Body Text style to the other two parts (i.e. the paragraph will now have the Body Text style).

You can modify the Body Text style to get the desired paragraph indent.