How to increase space before registration symbol in every instance

manually adjusting the kerning would take too long because of how many there are

Hi @bocdesigninc , If you want to actually kern the insertion point before the registration mark, rather than add a white space before and track, I think you would need a script in order to get all the insertion points. Something like this would find the registration marks and set the kerning of the proceeding insertion point to 50—change 50 in the first line to whatever value you need:

//kerning amount
var k = 50

var res = getTextSearch("®")
for (var i = 0; i < res.length; i++){
    res[i].parentStory.insertionPoints[res[i].index].kerningValue = k;
};   

/**
* Gets results of a text search as an array 
* @ param text to search for 
* @ return result array 
*/
function getTextSearch(fp){
    app.findTextPreferences = app.changeTextPreferences = app.findChangeTextOptions = null;
    app.findChangeTextOptions.properties = {includeHiddenLayers:true, includeLockedLayersForFind:true, includeLockedStoriesForFind:true, includeMasterPages:true} 
    app.findTextPreferences.findWhat = fp;
    return app.activeDocument.findText()
}

Find/Change all instances from [reg mark] to [hair space][reg mark]. This remains consistent across font sizes and styles, and easy to modify/undo. Even if you apply a character style for the other method, the spacing can vary with font and size. (If a hair space isn't enough, try a 1/6 space.)

This can be used for almost all superscript characters — TM, R, asterisks, footnote numbers, etc.

One approach would be to find the last character followed by the registration mark (which should be in a positive lookahead) and add a positive tracking value.

Not knowing the symbol, or all the possible preceeding characters I can't say whether you would want to use the dot (.),  \w or [\l\u] as your wildcard.

Instead of using GREP in your ParaStyle definition - which will unnecessarily slow you down - it's simply a one / constant character that doesn't need to by styled dynamically - assign CharStyle globally.