Prevent automatic tab insertion or conversion of spaces to tabs

Question

Google Docs has a "feature" that sometimes converts four spaces to one tab.

Copying and pasting text does not solve this problem, because the spaces in that text are converted to tabs automatically.

Is there a way to turn this off?

Answer 1

No way to turn of that I know of. So annoying.

You can work-around using normal copy-paste, then a search-and-replace.

1. Copy-Paste you content into the Google Doc
2. In a text-editor, enter a tab character then cut it to your clipboard
3. Back in Google Docs, highlight the content you wish to fix
4. Hit Ctrl + H to open Find and replace dialogue
5. Paste the tab character into the Find field
6. Insert 4 space characters into the Replace with field
7. Click Replace all

Answer 2

The approach that caused me the least headaches was to replace all spaces by another character (say underscore) in the original text, copy/paste it, then replace the underscore using find+replace. This was in Google slides.