Pages to ePub conversion

The  is known as an object replacement character. This is in your Word document before Pages touches it, and there is an article about how to use Word's advance find to locate this character (and remove it). Once you have done that, open the Word document in Pages and redo the EPUB document. The  character should be gone in your EPUB.

Something else that can generate an EPUB directly from a Word .docx document is the free Pandoc utility. It will install into /usr/local/bin, and is run from the command-line.

pandoc -s --metadata title="Sample EPUB" --metadata author="Mr. Magoo" -f docx -t epub3 -o sample.epub sample.docx

That generates an EPUB that can be opened in Apple Books and it would be interesting to know how it treats your 2024 Word document in the final result — especially your end notes.

I don't use Dropbox.

I am starting with a sample document of my own:

Which in an EPUB, the red circle reveals:

From that compart site link I provided in my last post, the image of that [obj] will not display, but right-click in the middle of its outline at the top of the page and choose Copy.

Now, right-click on your EPUB file and choose Open With : ebook-editor. That is a Calibre tool. Your EPUB source will open in ebook-editor. You can click and and drag the right edge of the left panel of that editor to expand it.

The first item of interest will be named chapter-1.xml. You would double-click on this name to display it in the center editor field as HTML/CSS3 syntax mixed with the text of this chapter of the EPUB. You will also see a Find/Replace panel there. Click in the Find field and paste. That will be the hidden [obj] symbol you copied from the compart site. Here I have done that and clicked the Find button. It detects the hidden [obj] object right after the word "of."

I leave Replace blank (nothing entered) and click Replace All. A confirmation panel will appear confirming the replacement(s). The [obj] will not appear in this panel after occurrences of. Click OK.

You would repeat this process for Chapter-2.xml through Chapter-n.xml (n being the last chapter of your EPUB). Then cmd+S to save the EPUB, and quit ebook-editor application.

Upon opening the EPUB in Apple's Books, the symbolic [obj] object(s) are gone.

Hard to tell. Were you using the EndNote product then to successfully produce that EPUB in 2023? If so, did you update that EndNote version, or the Pages version before the current problem with the EPUB?

Take the same document that you successfully exported to EPUB last year, exactly as you did then, and see if it messes up now.

Thanks for clearing up the end note info.

Some further questions:

• Word documents created by the same version of Word, or saved/exported from a different (but same version) application?
• Same fonts in Word and Pages, or is Pages performing font substitution because a faux italic font used in Word is not physically installed in macOS?
• Same version of Pages as in 2023 export to EPUB?
• After Pages opens, and translates the Word documents into .pages content, do the end notes appear correct at that stage?

I am trying to establish where in the document lifecycle above and prior to EPUB that potentially is impacting the workflow.

This the correct community to be posing Word translation into Pages documents, and their subsequent export to EPUB.

Apple does not guarantee that the translation of Word content into Pages document content will be without flaw and if there is something on that page(s) in the Word document that Pages cannot handle, it may do what you have shown. What you can do may be determined by the original content approximate to that Pages page number in the Word document, and if it is in a format that Pages can handle, or not.

I have never seen that behavior before, but I agree, it may be lines, paragraphs of text, or even bibliography entries that couldn't be translated and resulted in empty text boxes.

In the original Word document, what is on or around that page?

Pages export to EPUB is pretty much an immutable Apple black box without any user control beyond the type of flow selected and the option to embed fonts. You may need to perform the rather laborious italic to regular text treatment on the end notes to get the 2024 EPUB done.

Unless you choose to embed fonts in Word, it will include font references. Pages itself only puts font references into its documents, doesn't have the ability to embed them, and would use embedded fonts from Word after translation as font references too. Shame Microsoft didn't put the work into an EPUB generation feature in Word…

As for the EPUB, it is just an HTML/CSS3 styled compressed zip file and if you do not embed fonts via the EPUB export interface, it may take poetic license with its EPUB font references and their styling. By embedding fonts in the EPUB, it does explicit styling to the document's font spec.

This may be living proof that Pages does not support Word bibliography content during translation to Pages. I wonder if you could copy/paste that last Word page into a new Word document, and then save that page as a PDF. Then you drop that PDF onto a last Pages document page by itself before exporting to EPUB.

You can send feedback directly to the Pages product team for iOS/iPadOS. Specifcally mention the Object Replacement Character appearing in EPUBS generated on the Mac, but only when viewed in Apple Books on iOS/iPadOS. The Pages team may or may not contact you via email for more information.

To be honest, in over a dozen years, I have not seen much help in the Pages community from EndNote (application) users to diagnose and fix associated issues with Pages .vs. Endnote. Apple has not updated their Pages EndNote plug-in 3.3 in four years, and just what version of Endnote is, or is not compatible with Pages is illusory.

I don't use EndNote with Pages, so will be useless in solving the disparity between what worked last year and what content in the current Pages document is presently interfering with your prior success.