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L
Lawrence22960281ja25
Participant
September 6, 2025
Question

Lost All Tabs and Returns in Text Throughout Document

  • September 6, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 276 views

Hi All,

 

I opened a document I have been working on and noticed that, all of a sudden, all my tabs and returns have disappeared. All text in frames runs together. The fonts seem correct and color and font style formatting seems to be intact, but there are no returns and tabs anymore. WTH? Please help if you can!

2 replies

L
Community Expert
LaubenderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 12, 2025

@Lawrence22960281ja25 said: "… All text in frames runs together. "

Hi Lawrence,

does your document contain conditional text where one condition is applied to tabs and hard paragraph returns?

And then that specific condition's visibility was turned off?

 

Sample document (IDML file) attached.

 

Two screenshots from my German InDesign where in the text frame below tabs and hard returns are formatted with the condition "ConditionOntabsAndParagraphSigns". In the first screenshot the condition's visibility is turned on:

 

Here the visibility of the condition is turned off:

 

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

Willi Adelberger
Community Expert
Willi AdelbergerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 6, 2025

Did you work with paradgraph and character styles?

When you talk about returns, do you talk about paragraph or forced lines returns?

Did you save as INDD or other file type?

 

L
Lawrence22960281ja25Author
Participant
September 6, 2025

This had occurred to me. I just checked Paragraph Styles to see. There seemed to be nothing unusual applied, and I don't use Styles a lot anyway, so it's highly unlikely I had created anything and applied it here (or accidentally applied it). I did select all copy within a frame where I know I had applied tabs, and there were no tabs at all showing in the Tabs palette. I've never encountered anything like this before using Indesign. I'm stumped. 

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