Is there any way to change the return key work like enter in Apple Pages or just on the Mac in general?

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Level 1

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Is there any way to change the return key work like enter in Apple Pages or just on the Mac in general?

To make a long story short, I am needing to find a way to stop the return key from creating paragraph breaks in Apple Pages and instead create soft returns. Reason being, my job uses Adobe Indesign and whenever text has been copied from Pages is pasted/exported then placed as a .docx file, it completely breaks because of the paragraph breaks, while in contrast, soft returns (Shift + Return) does not. This would not this could possibly be a fix but the writers have all written on Windows computers in the past and constantly forget which causes issues for the page designers.

Which I have tried looking online for a solution but I have only seen being saying either to just use the shortcut or just replace it after the fact. But I am wanting to find a more permanent solution that takes the possible human error out of the equation.

iMac (24-inch, M1, 2021, 2 ports)

Posted on Nov 26, 2022 10:40 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,548 points

Nov 27, 2022 10:02 AM in response to A-Prey

The paragraph breaks in Pages are newline characters. A paragraph separator, line break within a paragraph, or soft return as it is frequently called is Unicode character U+2029.

If you export Pages to a Word .docx, the new lines will be changed to carriage return/line feed pairs. If exported to PDF, the linefeeds are actually replaced by spaces according to a hex dump of that copied content. I would recommend against copy/pasting directly from Pages into InDesign as the latter was really designed to receive content from MS Word.

The return key is an integral part of how pages is designed to inject paragraph marks and cannot be selectively changed for strictly Pages usage. Does the problem with InDesign go away when you use content created in MS Word and not sourced from Pages?

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Answer 2

Barry

Level 9

60,023 points

Nov 27, 2022 12:16 AM in response to A-Prey

Might be possible to remap the return key to send the same character code for return and for shift-return. But doing so could also have unwanted consequences.

Replacing it after the fact could be a relatively simple task using a find/replace all command when the document is completed.

Regards,

Barry

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Is there any way to change the return key work like enter in Apple Pages or just on the Mac in general?

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