Lost All Tabs and Returns in Text Throughout Document

[Lawrence22960281ja25]

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!

[Willi Adelberger]

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?

[Lawrence22960281ja25]

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. 

[Lawrence22960281ja25]

And when I say returns, I do mean forced (hard) return. The file is an Indesign file, nothing else. 

[leo.r]

And when I say returns, I do mean forced (hard) return. The file is an Indesign file, nothing else. 

By @Lawrence22960281ja25

What are your InDesign and operating system versions?

[Willi Adelberger]

Forced returns are in most cases a wrong use. Why you do not use paragraph returns?

Use paragraph styles, they are important. 

i have heard of your problem, but never when worked properly with styles and returns. 

[Lawrence22960281ja25]

I can’t say that I agree that forced returns should be an infrequent use.
After all, how would you take advantage of InDesign’s space after or before
paragraph?

Also, the document I’m working on is not long enough to warrant the use of
styles (IMO). For a long doc with a ton of copy, yes.

I have never run into this issue during my 22 years of using ID. Not sure
if there is a keystroke combo that would cause it that I may have
inadvertently invoked…?

_______________________________

<>

Lawrence Stewart
<Personal info removed by MOD>

[Abhishek Rao]

Hi @Lawrence22960281ja25,

Sorry to hear about the issue with your document. Could you confirm which version of InDesign and operating system you're using, and if this happens only in this file or also in new ones? Please try enabling Type > Show Hidden Characters to check if the returns and tabs are actually gone or just not displaying. It would also help to know if the text was typed in InDesign or imported from another source. As a test, try adding tabs and returns in a new document, save and reopen it, and also paste some affected text into a plain text editor to see if they reappear there. You can also check in Edit > Edit in Story Editor to confirm.

Let me know what you find.

Abhishek

[Barb Binder]

Hi @Lawrence22960281ja25:

There is some confusion on terminology. We press Enter for a hard return ¶, and Shift+Enter for a line break (which people also call a soft return). I think Willi is reading forced return as line break and not hard return as you intended. You do want hard returns ¶  between paragraphs to take advantage of all of paragraph level commands like space before and after. 

Now... where did your returns go? 

Is it possible that you have just hidden the non-printing symbols? Can we start by enabling Type > Show Hidden Characters, and make sure your screen mode is set to Normal and then can you please share a screen shot so that we can see what you are looking at? I hope there is an easy answer here because if all the returns were actually removed, you'd have to put them back in manually if you didn't have access to a backup file. That would not be a fun task.

~Barb

[Laubender]

@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 )