Prevent automatic tab insertion or conversion of spaces to tabs

Question

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?

Hive

As a workaround, I replaced every space with a non-breaking space. That is, I replaced Unicode U+0020 with Unicode U+00A0. – Hive

Another workaround is to upload the content as a new document rather than pasting into an existing one; no conversion is applied to uploads. You can then paste from the new Google Doc into an existing one without the conversion happening. – Suckow

Also here: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/106582/… – Fig

Answer 1

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

Flathead

If you're having trouble with typing a tab into the Find field, turn on regular expressions and use \t – Ekaterina

The drivenotepad plugin acts like a standard text editor (chrome browser only) – Triplicate

Nope, that doesn't work either... the inserted spaces are then, happily recombined into tabs... goddamn google !!! – Disaffection

Answer 2

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.

Wong

Answer 3

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.

Preamble

This works and it is quick and easy – Inevitable

Answer 4

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

Triplicate

Tried it and it seems to work. Only problem is I have to install it in every browser in every computer I use. – Triplicate

Answer 5

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

Terena

This seemed to work in some instances, but in other instances spaces are still converted. Unclear when it works and when it doesn't. – Salomo

In 2023, even CTRL+SHIT+V does the (annoying) space-to-tabs conversion. – Auberge