Spaces made tabs.

I had Appleworks files AWP that I turned into RTF files to import them into libreoffice. Much of the formatting like sticky spaces was lost as well as all the tabs that were 9 spaces are now all different sizes. Is there a way to easily turn the tabs into the same size without going to each line and adding or deleting spaces to make them try to conform.

You will always lose some formatting properties when you convert a document into an another file format.
The chances are even higher when you perform multiple conversions: AWP → RTF → ODF.
Maybe the RTF file format can not handle the TAB positions, and this format may contain the TAB characters only.

Never use TABs and Spaces together to position the next TAB. You can adjust the position of the TABs numerically in the paragraph style in the AOO/LO.

I don’t know the specifics of “Appleworks files”; so what does “tabs that were 9 spaces” mean? Does Appleworks insert a constant spacing each time you use Tab, inserting a whitespace equal to 9 usual spaces, and so the tabs in different lines are not horizontally aligned? or do you mean that the tab positions in your files were aligned to 9-space positions throughout the documents?

What did you use to convert to RTF? Appleworks? Then did the RTFs open OK in it after conversion, retaining the tab positions?

Possibly you need to file a bug report regarding that problem, with sample AWP and RTF files, and the PDFs/screenshots that show the problematic and expected results …

Is this file from the 1980s? What happens if you change the font to a monospace one like liberation mono and adjust the size. Do the spaces line up?
It is probably worth laying out the text again manually but using current tools to achieve the look. It is a result to be able to even read it if it really is from way back then
Sticky spaces are non-breaking spaces I think; they can be entered by Ctrl+ Shift+ Space

Sticky spaces are non breaking spaces, they did disappear in the conversion. I use them to prevent a line from just having 1 character in it.

Tabs are nine spaces means that were a tab is instead there are 9 spaces at the beginning of the line. Are they done differently in LibreOffice?

Thus it now appears as if the 9 spaces is different at the beginning of each line where they were.

Appleworks does not have a conversion to RTF inside of it. I opened the Appleworks files on EGOed and had EGOed save things in RTF.

Spent a couple months trying to get this all laid out as I have bee ninstering pictures into it something not possible in Appleworks.

You can use [Ctrl+H] Menu/Edit/Find & Replace.

In Find put the spaces that you want to replace with the tab.
In Replace: \t
Mark Regular expressions option.
Ok.

Regular expressions list

That did sort of work.

By sort of I mean that it replaced the spaces with a consistent space that was the same all the way throughout the document. Which is what I wanted. It did this 3776 times.

The bad part however is that the space that it replaces things with is a lot bigger than I wanted and in the process added 68 pages to the length of the document. Something I do not want as have ben carefully editing things to make it fit in the number of pages allowed.

Then replace the number of space that achieves what you want with tab and replace the rest with nothing. BTW you can find useful ‘Menu/View/Formatted marks’ to see where the spaces and tab are.

How can one set where the tab is supposed to be?

Select the text, and choose menu Format - Paragraph… - Tabs tab.

or

Choose menu Tools - Options… - LibreOffice Writer - General, and change Tab stops: value.

The tabs option under the first suggestion (of LeroyG?) is only there when the text is not selected.

There is no Options under the Tools menu

@adm222, If you select two paragraphs with different tabs values, the Tabs tab is not shown.

See LibreOffice Help in Inserting and Editing Tab Stops.

I have tried multiple times now to get rid of multiple tabs and just get one where I want it but it for some reason will not let me do that, let alone for the same document.

See How to get rid of all tab stops in a text document - #2 by LeroyG