Where did all those tabs come from?

When you open a Pages document, it has no visible tabulator stops at all.

However, there is a hidden set of default tab stops, just like in Open Office, Microsoft Word and many other word processors.

As soon as you add a manual tab stop to a paragraph, all previous default tabs disappear:


The distance between the hidden default tabs is defined in the inspector.



However, sometimes a paragraph suddenly gets plenty of visible tabs:

This can happen if you paste text from applications like TextEdit or AppleWorks. These applications do not have the concept of hidden default tabs, so they have to use real visible tabs instead.

The easiest way to get rid of them is to apply a paragraph style without tabs. You can often simply click on the red triangle to the right of the style name and choose "Revert to Defined Style".