In Pages 5, why are page thumbnails different sizes?

I have the same issue. I have not inserted any section breaks myself and the thumbnails change size seemingly randomly. Pages may be creating section breaks but I certainly have not. And as you can see in the screenshot, even Pages doesn't think it's a section break.

What's really weird is that the size of one thumbnails sometimes changes when I'm editing a different page.

If anyone knows what's going on I'd appreciate any info.

As the yellow border in your screenshot shows, you do not have section breaks. Thanks for taking the trouble to illustrate that. What you are seeing is neither normal nor intended; considering the general quality of the software quality control in Pages 5 it may well be one more bug that slipped through.

If you don't use section breaks, you can probably just assume that in this document, the thumbnail size is meaningless, and ignore it. If you do want to pursue it further, it might be helpful to know whether you only see this in one particular document or all documents and whether all of the content was created directly in Pages 5, or if some formatted content was imported or copy/pasted from another application.

Thanks Jeff. I think you're right in that it's a bug, meaningless, and doesn't really affect the document in any way.

If fact, I just finished the document and as I was going through a final check I noticed all the pages are now behaving as expected. That is, one big thumbnail for the first page and smaller ones for everything else. See new screenshot attached.

For reference, all tables and most graphics were created in Pages. I did copy/paste a few from Keynote but not on the pages with random thumbnail sizes. The rest are images imported by Shift-Cmd-V (Import>Choose).

Weird and a bit annoying, but not worth the pain and time to troubleshoot.

The one time I defend Pages 5 and I get caught out! 😀 Although to be fair there was a sequence of posts that dragged us into the abyss.

What version/s of Pages are you using? No-one has actually said. Unless it happens in Pages 5.5.2 the whole issue is redundant.

Anything else that might help us reproduce the problem? eg Very large thumbnails/Very small thumbnails?

If it comes and goes it may be a cosmetic glitch but may also be due to changes with text flowing back and forth as you edit it.

As you say, irritating but probably not fatal.

If you want:

Menu > Pages > Provide Pages Feedback

Attach any document that may demonstrate the problem. Whether Apple does anything about it is up to Apple, they have their hands full with more pressing issues we'd all love for them to fix first.

Peter

I was having this problem, too. I had a 27 page document that had one of the small thumbnails as the final page. When I clicked on the thumbnail to delete it, the yellow box would surround the previous page, as well, deleting both pages. After some troubleshooting, and reading what I also thought to be Peter's condescending tone, I found a fix that worked for me.

I deleted all the content on the page itself, which then automatically deleted the smaller thumbnailed page. Simple enough. Hope it works for everyone else!

When you create a new document and choose a template (Blank, School Report, etc.), the initial page that you are staring at is a section. Some templates incorporate multiple sections in their design. You can verify this with a thumbnail view sitting in its yellow prison.

Still in disbelief? With an open document in Pages, start your AppleScript Editor, copy/paste, compile, and run the following brief script. It will toss up a dialog with a section count for the entire document.

tell application "Pages"

activate

tell front document to set scount to count of every section

display dialog "Section count: " & scount

end tell

@VikingOSX Thanks for posting, but this seems like just some irrelevant sentences strung together. Whatever you are getting at it doesn't come across.

For the record, I still have this problem and it seems others do as well. It's unlikely that Apple gives a crap about it or will fix it anytime soon given the complete lack of care and attention their "flagship" word processing platform gets.

<Edited by Host>

Hi mr_bee

OS X 10.10.3

Open your Pages document.

Click on Launchpad in your dock.

You may need to click on Other

to see Script Editor

Click on Script Editor and Paste Vicking's script

Click on the hammer icon to compile, then click on the right triangle to run the script

To see this:

Regards, and Happy Paging 🙂.

Ian.

I can reproduce your reported error message when opening Word .docx documents in Pages v5.2.2, and Pages v5.5.3. Once the document is saved as a native .pages document, the script reports the section count correctly. I have not found any of my Word .doc files that cause this error.

I cannot reproduce your error opening native .pages documents from Pages '08, Pages '09, Pages v5.2.2, or Pages v5.5.3.