How do I paste from email to Pages (macbook pro os 10.6.8) and get normal text formatting?

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How do I paste from email to Pages (macbook pro os 10.6.8) and get normal text formatting?

When copy text from email or a pdf and paste into Pages, I get simple text formatting. How do I change that to normal text in Pages documents?

Posted on Jul 14, 2014 7:29 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 14, 2014 7:53 AM in response to BethK18

Let’s say I have an email with some words that have red URL links associated with them. If I select Edit > Paste, the text, active link, and link color red are placed into my Pages document in the web font and font-size used. If I choose Edit > Paste and Match Style, then only regular text without coloration or hyperlinks is deposited into my Pages document using the Pages default font, font size, font decoration, and color for the current Paragraph style.

Same drill with PDF text.

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Answer 2

BethK18 Author

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Jul 14, 2014 8:08 AM in response to VikingOSX

This still does not re-distribute the text in a normal way -- some lines will be 32 characters long, others will be 5 characters long, it's all over the map. I have manually corrected this distribution, but it seems to me Pages should have some automatic way to do it. I don't know the name for the thing I want to do, I can only say I want the text to come out normal, with regular margins, in the Pages document.

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Answer 3

BethK18 Author

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Jul 15, 2014 5:53 AM in response to BethK18

I'm hearing a deafening silence here. Word can't do it either. The answer seems to be: "No, no computer is capable of doing what you ask." I can only think "Wow. So computers are really not nearly as smart as we used to think!" What a bummer.

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Answer 4

Jul 15, 2014 8:18 AM in response to BethK18

Beth,

Microsoft has worked on Word since the 1980’s and it still doesn’t do our thinking, or automatic document restructuring after a paste operation. It would be historic, if Pages instinctively knew your typographic intentions and autonomously performed them as a result of a plain text paste operation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, as you have observed.

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Answer 5

Yellowbox

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Jul 15, 2014 8:35 AM in response to BethK18

Hi Beth,

you wrote: I have manually corrected this distribution

What did you have to do? I am thinking that if

some lines will be 32 characters long, others will be 5 characters long

then the email app is adding spaces and or carriage returns. This happens when an email message quotes a previous reply in the thread. Different email apps have different rules for word warp. To and fro a few times, quoting then requoting he said/she said just adds more reformatting. It is not the fault of Pages (or Word). They are just displaying the text that is pasted.

Regards,

Ian.

Edit: and or carriage returns

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Answer 6

BethK18 Author

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Jul 15, 2014 11:03 AM in response to Yellowbox

Thanks Yellowbox. That could be at least part of the solution. I'm now thinking of a pdf document that I wanted to save in Pages so that I could edit it. I will have to look at that again later tonight. I appreciate everyone's input here.

The way I have manually corrected this in the past was just to start at the bottom of the document, place the cursor at the beginning of a too-long line below any too-short line, hit the delete key, add a space between the last word of the short line and the first word of the long line, and continue in like manner upwards till I get to the beginning of the text. One would hope you could enter some command like "rewrap text" and have it come out looking normal, but if there is such a way I don't know what it is. (PS. thanks for reminding me of the word I was looking for -- "wrap" 🙂)

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Answer 7

BethK18 Author

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Jul 15, 2014 5:13 PM in response to BethK18

A little more experimenting leads me to this: This problem happens sometimes with email, but not always, explanation not clear. But this happened with a very long pdf document that I wanted to copy to pages for editing. Is there some explanation for this? Here is a screen shoot of part of the pdf text:

After copying, and then pasting, retaining format in Pages I see this:

This doesn't look like "retaining format" to me. Am I doing something wrong?

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Answer 8

Jul 15, 2014 5:35 PM in response to BethK18

There is a return at the end of every line. You need to clean up the text, starting with:

Menu > View > Show Invisibles

Peter

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Answer 9

Jul 15, 2014 5:59 PM in response to BethK18

Peter has a point.

I copy/pasted a paragraph of Lorem Ipsum from TextEdit into a new Pages v4.3 document. It is formatted as body text. After this, I inserted a couple of hard returns. I positioned my cursor at the first return after the Latin text, so any content that was applied as Paste and Match Style, would inherit the preceding paragraph style.

When I pasted the three paragraphs of English text from the PDF document, they appeared as a continuation of the Latin text layout, and required no format clean-up afterward — with all the text having the same appearance, flow, and normal paragraph spacing.

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Answer 10

BethK18 Author

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Jul 15, 2014 7:59 PM in response to VikingOSX

I'm sorry, I must be annoying you terribly. I don't know how to clean up the text after opening show invisibles, other than what I've done before, deleting each return, a big pain. I tried to do what VikingOSX suggested here, that seemed to be just what I'm looking for, just using instead of lorem ipsum a quotation I happened to have in another pages document. Here's a screen shot of the result:

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Answer 11

Jul 15, 2014 8:50 PM in response to BethK18

Follow the pattern:

Real paragraph returns are double returns.

End of lines are single returns.

You want to replace all the single end of line returns with word spaces, but if you do a straight replace you will also replace the double return to make them two word spaces in a row.

1. Find and Replace all double Returns with a marker e.g. >R<

2. Find and Replace all single Returns with a word space.

3. Find and Replace all >R< with single Returns.

Because Pages 5.2 is more or less useless for this, do it in Pages '09 or any other Word Processor that has a working Find and Replace.

Peter

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