Can you evenly distribute tabs in the Tabs dialog box?

Question

Hello.
I work with lots of statistics arranged in columns and separated by tabs in text boxes. The number of columns will vary, but the text box is always the same width. I manually space out the tabs to evenly fill the text box. This is slow. I wonder if there is any way to select all tabs and then evenly distribute them across the Tabs dialog box? Like how you can evenly distribute multiple elements using the Align tool.
The 'Repeat Tab' function is close to what I need, but an 'Evenly Distribute Selected Tabs' would be even better.
Thanks,
/stephen

Answer 1

Scripts are easy, and very powerful, and you don't need any programming knowledge to use them. Just install them (see How to install scripts in InDesign | InDesignSecrets) and double-click the name inthe scripts panel to run them.
You don't have to use the ESTK as suggested above, a plain text editor like Notepad or Text edit is fine (be sure to save as plain text, but add the .jsx extension). Since these scripts are very old, there's a chance they won't work in newer versions, but that can usually be overcome by making a subfolder in the scripts folder with the correct version name and placing an older script into the subfolder. In the case of the second script that would be a folder named "Version 4.0 Scripts" (without the quotes, but case-sensitive). I have no idea waht version Gerald's script was written for, but I've removed the <br \> codes and replaced them with the correct line breaks below if you want to try it:
if (app.documents.length != 0){
     if (app.selection.length == 1){
          var a = app.selection[0].constructor.name;
          switch (app.selection[0].constructor.name){
              case "Text":
               case "InsertionPoint":
               case "Character":
               case "Word":
               case "Line":
               case "TextStyleRange":
               case "Paragraph":
               case "TextColumn":
               case "Story":
                    main();
                    break;
               default:
                    alert("No text selected.");
                    break;
     else{
          alert("Nothing selected.");
else{
     alert("No document opened.");
function main() {
     var allSel = app.selection;
     var nPara = allSel[0].paragraphs.length;
     var allPara = allSel[0].paragraphs;
     for (var m=0; m < allPara.length; m++) {
          var aSel = allPara[m];
          var myTabList = aSel.tabStops;
          var lastX = myTabList[-1].position;
         var myStep = myWidth / myTabList.length;
          for (var n=(myTabList.length-1); n >= 0; n--) {
               myTabList[n].position =  myWidth+n;
          for (var n = 0; n<myTabList.length;  n++) {
              myTabList[n].position = (n+1) * myStep;