How can I completely remove pages from a Pages document?

If you are using Lion or ML, try File > Duplicate.

File > Duplicate has been in Mac OS a long time. It just creates a copy, same size. This 78MB of useless stuff is in the file, so gets duplicated with the file.

...try copying the content and Pasting it into a new document. See if those actions leave the trash behind.

Well, yes, that works, but it kind of defeats the purpose of what I was trying to do. If the only way to delete pages out of a Pages document is to make a brand new document, that seems kinda dumb.

When I created a new 9-page document by copying and pasting, it was now 12.5MB (instead of the 95MB of the document where 35 pages had been deleted, leaving the same nine pages). When I deleted 2 pages from this document, it remained 12.5MB; presumably the two deleted pages are still hidden in the document. I really can't see what advantage this offers, especially since the deleted material is no longer in its original form; it's apparently just a big glob of code.

In the Old Days, using Save As... on a PageMaker file would clean out all the incremental changes and produce a new document in its present state, with nothing extra. But Save As... in Pages just duplicates the whole thing, with the 78+Mb of deleted junk.

Makes no sense to me...

What action did you take to "delete" the 35 pages and 15 TIFFs?''

I selected them in the thumbnail sidebar and pressed the Delete key. The second time I did it I noticed there is a "Delete Page..." command in the Edit menu, so I used that. Which is what the Pages Manual says to do. In both cases, a dialog appeared asking if I was sure I wanted to delete page XX, and assuring me that "The section containing this page will be deleted." I don't have any sections in the document (it's all one), but I clicked the Delete button and the pages disappeared—but as I said, the document remained the same size, and when I pried it open with Pacifist I saw there was 78+MB of mystery data in it, in a folder titled ".iWTrash". The leading dot makes it invisible I guess, but I don't see why since it's hidden inside the document anyway.

As I recall, Pages documents were originally .zip files or something easily opened, but I thought I'd read that had changed. The contextual menu's "Open With" gives three possibilities: Archive Utility (which makes the 94.7MB Pages file into a 2.2MB .cpgz file, which when double-clicked recreates the 94.7MB original—now that's compression!); Pacifist (which opens the file so I can see what's in it); and The Unarchiver (which converts the Pages file into a folder of its contents, including the ".iWTrash" folder which is invisible in the Finder because of its leading dot.

Is this a WP document or a PL document?

It's a PL document.

I suspect you had floating images in a Word Processing document and deleted the text. The images are still there on the removed pages, if you do a series of page breaks they should reappear on the additional pages where you can delete them directly.

Well, no, it's a Page Layout document, and I deleted the pages, not the items on them (half had text, half had TIFF graphics). I tried adding blank pages back into the document, but they're blank; the text and graphics don't appear on them.

But all that data is still in the file, now in "bulk" form, doing nobody any good.

Okay, so I took the 9-page (94MB) document, with the 78MB ".iWTrash" folder in it, and deleted four more pages. But this time I first deleted the material on the pages, then deleted the (now blank) pages. Suddenly the document is a mere 6.6MB! I opened it up, and it has only the material that's visible in the document, no ".iWTrash" folder. The other 78MB has disappeared also. Seems kind of tedious if you have to first delete the material on the pages before deleting the pages; but maybe if you delete all the pages (with the material still on them) but one, then delete the material on the last page and then delete that page, it'll get rid of the whole mess? Complicated, and of course none of this is explained in the manual. Nor can I see any logical reason for it.

Another experiment: I took the 9-page (94MB) document, with the 78MB ".iWTrash" folder in it, and deleted four more pages, by simply selecting them and deleting them (without deleting the material on them first). Now the file is 12.5MB, and Pacifist reveals it has an .iWTrash folder of 5.5MB, i.e. approximately the material that was deleted this time, but it's lost the 78MB that was deleted the last time.

Well, this is all lots of fun, but it still makes no sense. If it's some kind of "dummy's backup", I can't see any way to make any use of it. Otherwise it just takes up space to no use.

The other possibility is images on captured master pages.

Do PL documents have master pages? On which you can place elements that will appear on all pages (such as, say, crop marks)? Seems to me my so-far brief perusal of the Pages Manual indicates not. Which doesn't make sense.

Thanks, everyone, for your responses.

I see there's a file called "buildVersionHistory.plist" in the file package, but I see nothing about a version history either in any menu, nor mentioned in the Manual. I guess it would make sense to retain this stuff if there were a version history function, but I don't find any.

I tried what you suggest, but no triangle or menu appears; perhaps this is a 10.7 & later feature. Might explain the retention of the .IWTrash folder though.

By the way, Duplicate doesn't strip out the .IWTrash folder, at least not in 10.6. May be another 10.7 feature.

Thanks for your help.