word 2013- need help fixing indentation, thanks in advance :)

First, what EXACTLY is the problem with the indentation? Are you using tabs, or (more sensibly) setting indentation via the ruler? Do you have carriage returns at the ends of lines which shouldn't be there? There are lots of potential pitfalls.

If you are using tabs, the first thing to do is get rid of 'em.

Whether or not you're doing that, highlight (select) the entire manuscript, and then set a standard indentation style with the ruler. If that doesn't work, you have some other problem regarding the relationship between paragraphs, and it's hard to know what to recommend without knowing what that might be.

And if you're editing, presumably you're looking at each individual paragraph anyway, so you might take that as an opportunity to fix indentation problems as you go.

In any case, you first need to figure out what the problem really is. The indentation irregularity is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. And there might be multiple problems.

caw

There still are some quicker fixes for this problem. I do a lot of editing of electronic manuscripts that require fixing these kinds of problems. Among things you can do: replace every occurrence of two consecutive spaces with a single space. There's generally little reason to have two spaces in a row in a manuscript. Then if you still have a single space first line indent, do a global replace for paragraph mark-space, and change that just to a paragraph mark. And, as I said, just get rid of your tabs; best way to do this is to globally replace the tab character with nothing. Once you've got your manuscript all aligned left, with no indentation, THEN select the whole thing and use the ruler to set first line indentation.

If you have need for tabs in some places, those can be reset during your editing process. Keep in mind also that you can do things like center text without using tabs.

As I said, I go through this exercise a lot. I hope that all makes sense. In any case, you'll now know how to avoid this hassle in the first place.

caw

There are many that are now indented twice because you still have tabs and multiple spaces in your documents.

I would:
1) Select all, and under Paragraph, set to first line at .5.
2) Do a replace all for tabs, using ^t to denote a tab. Replace all tabs with nothing.
3) Do a replace all for multiple spaces. Replace 2 spaces with 1, and do this a few times until you have no instances of multiple spaces. (Or just do a single replace all for 5 spaces, if you know you always used 5.)
4) To remove single spaces at the beginning of paragraphs, replace ^p (denotes paragraph) followed by a space with simply ^p.
5) You can fix additional errors in your editing pass, but doing the above should make it much faster.

It's perfectly fixable. Trust me. I'm given a lot of stuff with "fake formatting" and extra spaces that I have to transfer from Word to Publisher and make perfect. All heck breaks loose if I don't groom it first Once you have those few replace codes memorized, life is easier.

As a related hint I've found useful: You do have to be wary when doing these kinds of global search/replace things. It is easy to screw something up and actually make it worse, if you don't think it out carefully. If I'm uncertain, I frequently will replace something with a character-string that won't occur normally in the text, like "qqqq" or "zzzz". Then I can check that to see if it really accomplished what I intended. If it does, than I just replace that character-string with the thing I wanted.

caw

I_love_coffee said:

Thanks Blacbird, I was actually thinking of doing a global replace to fix my quotes, making sure I placed all of my punctuation inside. do you think this is a bad idea?

Click to expand...

That could get tricky, depending on how you've used quotations. If they are entirely in dialogue, you could globally replace "? for instance, with ?" to catch the end of questions. You'd need to do something similar for periods, commas, exclamation points. You'd also have to make sure you don't have any extraneous spaces involved. Now, for the next BIG hint:

Make a copy of your text, and try the replacement on that. Never ever ever mess with the only copy of a manuscript that you have.

caw