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?
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.
Thank for trying but that does not work. It is not possible to select just the blue dot line (see attached image). I know about all the other lines and dots. I am just concerned about the series of dots between the line that seem to be part of the text line.
Further advice is appreciated.
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.
My response was based on enabling the show invisible on an existing line of text and then changing that font color to white which left just the blue dots similar to what you have shown. I have no other advice to offer.
What happens if you copy the formatting from a part of the document that looks right?
Blue dots between lines in Pages
