find and replace in Pages. Problem

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Level 1

26 points

find and replace in Pages. Problem

I'm on a MAC STUDIO using Sonoma

I've exported a document from a scanned Pdf

It won't go directly into Pages, so I export an editable text doc from Adobe Acrobat to Word or to text, my only options.

Word is just impossible. It hangs. It doesn't like the document.

So I open the word doc in Pages.

It's easy, it's beautiful, except for one thing.

I'm attaching an image of the troublesom Pages document. Almost every line has a paragraph end symbol.

I would do a search and replace (with nothing; there's already a space) but when I copy the paragraph symbol and put it into the search box, Pages finds the space BEFORE the paragraph symbol.

It can't FIND the paragraph symbol.

Please help me do a search and replace for that symbol so that I can get on with this frustrating project?

Mac Studio (2023)

Posted on Aug 11, 2024 12:32 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Yellowbox

Level 7

21,191 points

Aug 12, 2024 12:17 AM in response to nowsthetime

Hi nowsthetime,

In Pages, the tab character in Find & Replace is \t

Regards,

Ian.

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Answer 2

Aug 11, 2024 2:34 PM in response to nowsthetime

Adobe Acrobat Pro as a true PDF editor can also generate an optical character recognition (OCR) layer on the scanned PDF. With that registered text layer over the scanned document image inside the PDF, now you have something that you can ask MS Word v16.31 or later to open and it will produce a normal Word .docx document without returns after each line. That has been my experience.

That .docx can then be opened in Pages without the paragraph marks after each line.

You can redo the original scanned PDF in Acrobat Pro as mentioned in the first paragraph, or you can wade further into the mess in Pages and use Find/Replace using a single \n character to represent every paragraph mark and a single space in the replace field. You will still need to insert a paragraph mark when you are done after each intentional paragraph or single sentence that stands on its own.

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Answer 3

nowsthetime Author

Level 1

26 points

Aug 11, 2024 3:02 PM in response to VikingOSX

Thanks. I'm on a mac using Word 16.87. Maybe it's because I'm on a Mac Studio with silicon??? Because the the scanned and OCR'd PDF document outputs into Word very nicely BUT I get a spinning beachball every time I try to select a word in that Word document or even scroll down. The beachball does stop, eventually, but then it starts up with my next move. It would take a lifetime to deal with that Word document. Anyway, this question was about Pages, which is so much friendlier to use, IF ONLY it did a search and replace in the brilliant manner Word does. PS: THANKS FOR \n! Now if I could only find what to use to find the zillion tab stops the PDF exports.

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Answer 4

nowsthetime Author

Level 1

26 points

Aug 12, 2024 9:34 AM in response to Yellowbox

Thanks so MUCH!

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