Odd error with the paragraph indent function.

I’ve no idea how this happened, but the paragraph indent (inserted with the “tab” key) in my copy of LibreOffice creates a huge indent that renders my document unusable for formal work of any kind. There must be an option to alter the paragraph indent size that I accidentally altered. I would greatly appreciate any help provided.

You’re probably talking about the first line indent.

From the description of your procedure (inserted with the “tab” key), you create this “alinea space” manually and you rely on on the default even-spaced tab stops (every 1.25 cm by default). But, the tab stops located before the last explicitly positioned tab stop are suppressed. Therefore, if you accidentally defined a tab stop in the ruler at 10,3 cm, the Tab key will send your text at 10.3 cm and further Tabs will resume at 11.25cm and every 1.25 cm.

When you hit Return, you create a new paragraph with the same characteristics at the current one and you inherit the formatting.

To fix the problem, select all impacted paragraphs and remove the offending tab(s) from the ruler (drag it/them out of the ruler).

However, this is not the “right” way to create “alinea space” at the start of a paragraph. Text paragraphs (opposed to headings or other paragraphs not part of the main discourse) should be formatted Text Body paragraph style and not Default style. You just need to change Text Body in its Indents & Spacing tab to include a First line indent at the preferred distance. This first line indent is automatically applied and no longer needs Tab triggering, which makes the alinea space independent of any tab setting.

You are encouraged to read the Writer guide to discover what you can benefit from style use.

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