Hard blank spaces in text

Question

Hard blank spaces in text

A few weeks ago we bought an iMac G5 Intel, and moved files onto it from our old Quadra 650, whose O.S. is 7.5.5. In particular, we moved a number of documents created in MS Word 6, and converted them to Pages. These were draft chapters for a book, and had footnotes, but nothing else to complicate the conversion. The text is divided into paragraphs, but we have not added Section or Page breaks. The version of Pages is 2.0, created 29/04/2005, modified 04/01/2006. After conversion, some of the chapters now have irremoveable big spaces or blanks in the text. No text has been lost, there are just blank slabs which we cannot close up, sometimes between paragraphs, sometimes within a paragraph, but always the bottom quarter or third of the page concerned. The insertion point won't go into such an area, showing "Invisibles" reveals nothing there. "Widows and orphans" is selected, but trying the other options in the "pagination and breaks" section of Inspector simply shifts the empty space elsewhere. Changing font style or size does not help. Nor does changing to US Letter – in any case, we want to work with A4 size.
When we convert the footnotes into endnotes, the problem vanishes, but this is no solution, as we need to use footnotes.

iMac G5 Intel Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Mar 21, 2006 4:25 AM

Reply

Answer 1

MMINSO

Level 1

10 points

Mar 21, 2006 9:34 PM in response to Martin and Christine

Some possible workarounds:

You could try to find a friend/co-worker with a copy of Word (either Mac or Windows), open the old Word docs and save them as a newer version of Word, RTF, or as a text file, then transfer that to your new iMac and open in Pages 2.0 to see if this eliminates the extra spaces.

Or, try copying the text out of Pages, paste into TextEdit, then copy the text out of TextEdit and paste back into Pages.

Remember that Word version 6 goes back to 1996, so it will become increasingly difficult to find apps that support opening/importing those files. Also, the Word .doc format is proprietary to Microsoft and there is no guarantee that it will be supported by other programs in the future.

If your work is irreplaceable I would recommend saving a copy in plain text format and storing on archival media (backup tape or burn a CD-R).

Powerbook G4 1.5 Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Reply

Answer 2

Mar 22, 2006 12:10 AM in response to Martin and Christine

Check and see if your Pages document hass the default for Widow and Orphan lines set. You can find this in the Text inspector, I believe.

There are three additional choices for the Text inspector. large blank spaces at the end of a page sounds like it may be keeping lines together.

As for spaces between paragraphs, Your text may be using a paragraph stl which has a certain value for Before.

If the majority of your document is paragraph text with no heading or other paragraph style changes, then try selecting all and selecting the paragraph style for Body. See if that gets you what you wanted.

Message was edited by: Gerry Straathof

Reply

Answer 3

Mar 23, 2006 1:51 AM in response to MMINSO

Thanks for the suggestion, but the document was in the latest version of Microsoft Word for Macs before we converted it to a Pages doc. TextEdit doesn't do footnotes, and this is a chapter for an academic monograph.

Reply

Answer 4

Mar 23, 2006 1:56 AM in response to Gerry Straathof

Dear Gerry, only "Widows and orphans" has been selected and unselecting it simply shifts the blank spaces elsewhere in the document. All other options under the "Pagination and breaks" section have not been selected.The paragraph style is for "Body". We had tried all these dodges before posting our plea -- which is still a plea, as we don't want to have to go back to using Microsoft Word.

Reply

Answer 5

Mar 23, 2006 3:37 AM in response to Martin and Christine

So fiddling with "Keep paragraph with next", "Space before/after paragraph" didn't help then?

What about putting the cursor just before a space-block, and advancing it while holding the shift key down. Does this select the block too or just the text before and after the block?

Reply

Answer 6

Mar 23, 2006 4:13 AM in response to Martin and Christine

Thanks for the suggestion, but the document was in the latest version of Microsoft Word for Macs before
we converted it to a Pages doc. TextEdit doesn't do footnotes, and this is a chapter for an academic monograph.

But I think the suggestion related to opening the original Word doc in TextEdit to see if the blanks were there, and then if not perhaps copy/pasting that text into Pages, as an exercise (even if its not practical to do the whole publication that way). How long is the publication (no of pages)?

Reply

Answer 7

Mar 24, 2006 4:19 AM in response to Martin and Christine

In reply to these two last suggestions, no, there were no blank spaces in the Word document, and not all the cursor will in the world will make those blank spaces disappear. However, we have just come across an earlier discussion thread which we now realize is our problem too, a Bug which makes Pages useless for much academic writing. Here is a comment posted as part of that January 06 discussion: "Pages 2 makes no provision for breaking footnotes across page boundaries. The result is strange and amateurish-looking pages, filled with puzzling gaps and white spaces, in any academic paper that has discursive (long) footnotes.

Almost all academic papers, at least in my discipline of history, have discursive footnotes. Mine are no exception, and all of the book chapters and articles I write in Pages accordingly look as if they were composited by a blind man when I print them out.

The effects of this problem are clear on pretty nearly every page that a historian (or other academic or advanced student in the humanities) writes. To make the notes look normal enough to pass on to a colleague without embarrassment, I will have to save my documents into Word and re-open and tinker with them there.

This problem seems to me to be a bug, not a missing feature--acutely so, in a program whose raison d'être is the production of attractive-looking text documents--because I don't know of any other commercially-available word processor that has this problem: not Word, of course, not Nisus, not Mariner Write, not Mellel, not AppleWorks. (Indeed, not even WriteNow, a program last updated in 1994.)"
We have just emailed our own complaint to Mac feedback, too. Christine and Martin

Reply