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Blue dots between lines in Pages

I opened an old document that was perfectly fine. It now has — between some lines but not all — a series of blue dots in a sort of morse code pattern. I know about “Show Invisibles.” I have that on and it looks perfectly fine other than this weird periodic pattern. Any clues?


Posted on Jul 16, 2024 12:41 PM

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5 replies

Jul 18, 2024 2:51 AM in response to emcbjr

Your screenshot shows that the blue dots are right above the spaces characters. I would have expected them to mark the spaces right between the surrounding characters, not above. Also the line height looks weird (clearly seen from the selection). Could there be some issues with the base line of text? There is a super script in the second line. How did you create this?


You could also copy the text and past into a new TextEdit document. This might still look weird but you can then change the format to "Plain Text", dropping any kind of formatting. Copy that plain text and paste it back into your pages file in a place where the formatting seems correct (either before or after the distorted line), then delete the weird stuff.


Jul 16, 2024 1:52 PM in response to emcbjr

Select the lines with just dots and apply black text color instead of white. That will end the "morse" effect. As for the darker of the three lines shown, that appears to be the fixed footnote separator at the bottom of the page. The very thin lines appear to be 0.25 pt line shapes inserted to stretch between margins.


Tested: Pages v14.1, macOS 14.5.

Blue dots between lines in Pages

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