I have been given a set of Page files with a bunch of numbered lists. When I 'Export as Text' the numbers do not get included in the result. E.g. lines go from the following in Pages
to the following in the text file.
Line one
Line two
This seems pretty ridiculous. Is this a feature? Known problem? Does it have a work around?
I am running Pages version 12.2.1 (7035.0.161)
Mac mini (M1, 2020)
First, I didn't have a choice of the input - I was given Page files.
I understand the idea that numbering is formatting, I just think it is bogus. I can enter numbered lines by numbering them myself or by using the numbered lists features. Textually these are hard to tell apart but when save as that, 'text', the result is different. We'll leave it as a design decision I disagree with.
The work-around is to save as a PDF, copy that content and paste into my text editor.
I did try it and it still skips the numbers, treating them as format rather than content. Which is consistent with the earlier notion that this numbering is just formatting.
Also, this doesn't work if I want the entire content of a multi-page document. Only seems wiling to select a page at a time. And 'select all' followed by 'copy' also fails.
I did a mass conversion to pdf and then cut and pasted. If I had more documents I could have automated this, but it was not worth the effort with only 10 files.
You can use Quick Look on a Pages document, where you select the numbered list, copy to the clipboard, and then paste into your text editor.
I tested selecting a numbered list from a Quick Look viewed Pages document; copied to the clipboard, and then pasted correctly into Sublime Text 4.
In Microsoft Word (v16.70 for instance) one can save a list as plain text and the numbers are preserved, though you are warned in the save as dialog:
and the result screencaptured from Quick Look:
The free LibreOffice Writer, being a deliberate Microsoft Word clone, also saves lists as numbered plain text just like MS Word.
However, Pages is not a Word clone and removes any attributed text or styles (e.g. list style) from the pure plain text that it exports. Use the right tool for your end result.
I recommend dragging from top-left downward to select text in Quick Look.
As can be seen in the example below, showing the selection of text in a numbered list, the automatically created numbers of the list are "format," and not part of the text. Note that the blue background showing the selected text does not include the line numbers and the periods marking each row.
When that formatted material is converted to 'plain text,' the unselected numbers are not included in the selection.
Regards,
Barry
Interesting. I tried Quick Look again. Got odd results. With a two item list, it left off the numbering on the first line. With 3 it got them all. The test included text both before and after the numbered list. Weird. I tried it a couple of times and got the same result. See below
Test one
Line one
2. Line two
End test
Test two
1. Line one
2. Line two
3. Line three
End test
Numbering of lists dropped when exporting to text using Pages
