deleting paragraph marks

Hi mbpelliie,

Select a paragraph symbol

Menu > Edit > Find > Use Selection for Find

Menu > Edit > Find > Find...

to see this

I typed <space>unicorn<space> into the Replace box.

Click on Replace All

Here we go, I have changed unicorn to red text.

Happy Paging!

Regards,

Ian.

This is a little buggy in Pages but...

Find & Replace invisibles by selecting what you want to replace then

choose “Edit” Drop down menu > Find > Use Selection for Find

Or press (command+E)

Your highlighted selection is placed in the Find line in the “Find & Replace” window

You will not see it on the Find line, but it is there.

Something is there because the word “Find” no longer shows in the Find line.

Now you can use Find and Replace just like you use it with text

Or you can add invisibles to the Replace line too:

1) Highlight the invisibles symbol you want to put in the “Replace” line.

2) Click “Edit” drop down menu > Find > Use Selection for Replace

Your highlighted selection is placed in the Replace line in the “Find & Replace” window

You will not see it on the Replace line, but it is there.

Something is there because the word “Replace” no longer shows in the Replace line.

Re: how to replace paragraph markers and tabs in Pages

You can do a search and replace in any texteditor. Page 5 has become needlessly clumsy.

1. If you don't have it already add an extra return at the ends of real paragraphs (so there are 2)

2. Do a search and replace on 2 paragraph returns by copying and pasting the 2 returns into the Find, replace with a marker eg <P>

3. Search and replace on the returns, replacing them with a space

4. Search on <P> and replace with a paragraph return.

Apps like TextSoap will do all this for you.

Peter

Hi mbpellie,

Just adding to Peter's step 1.

1. If you don't have it already add an extra return at the ends of real paragraphs (so there are 2)

You could make a guess that a full stop (period) followed by a paragraph mark is the end of a real paragraph.

Copy one [full stop and paragraph mark] and paste into Find.

Replace All with full stop<P>

Then proceed with Peter's steps 3-4.

This is not infallible; you will need to proof read. But it will help make it easier to do Step 1 instead of typing extra paragraph marks on 150 pages. And it negates step 2.

Regards,

Ian.

Menu > View > Show invisibles

You can select a paragraph mark the same as anything else.

And you seem to have ignored undernourished's detailed instruction for "Use Selection to Find".

If you can, use Pages '09 v4.3 instead which has comprehensive search and replace unlike Pages 5.x.

Peter

I don't know where this issue originates - it may be that Acrobat Pro added the paragraph marks to the line endings or they could be the original document as a part of it's formatting.

Automator has a 'extract text from PDF' action. I would run that on the original document to see if it is different to the modified Acrobat one.

Add a 'Get selected Finder items' and a 'Extract PDF Text' action to a new workflow & select your document in Finder & run it. It may give you different results to open in Pages.

Drew

pdf files do not have a constant flow of text like Word Processor documents. The text is in chunks, usually one line at a time with an anchor point. It may even be broken up into smaller pieces by changes in formatting such as kerning which is done simply by adding a new anchor point.

Preview is smart enough to not just detect columns but also to detect paragraphs. Use that to extract the text instead of Adobe Acrobat which seems to get worse with every iteration now, like most of Adobe's software.

Peter

Preview & the 'extract text' Automator action are the same rendering engine as far as I can tell - that is why I wonder if it will parse text without forcing paragraph marks.

Apologies if it doesn't work, I just thought it was worth trying another tool, there are also command line pdf extraction tools & text filtering options but I suspect that the OP wants to use GUI tools for it.

Clicking in the text in Preview and going command a (select All), Copy and Paste, which does not insert line breaks, seems to me easier than going through the arcane and unreliable procedures of Automator.

Also I would not swear that Preview is using the same "rendering engine" of Automator, in fact I have serious doubts that is true, because even the way it converts .eps files to pdf is not the same.

Peter

Automator is just an Application made by Apple to allow you to join tasks together to make it very easy to 'automate' tasks on your Mac. It's up to you if you don't want to use it, it may mean you don't have to mess about trying to find & replace the paragraph marks.

Whatever you decide just make a copy of the original document & work on that. There is really nothing you can do to the original if you make a copy, especially if you also put a copy on to a USB disk & then put that somewhere for safe keeping.

Have you even tried PeterBreis0807's suggestion –

Open the document in Preview, 'Edit > Select All', 'Edit > Copy', move over to pages & paste it in. Does it look broken in the same way?

We both suspect that Adobe Acrobat has ruined your text, using another tool may prevent that from happening.

If you are able to do so you post the document online & allow us to try to do the steps or you could export a single page in Preview if you wanted. We are guessing how your original document is formatted, which makes it difficult to see where the issue is.

Do you know about keyboard shortcuts for selecting?

Hold shift and press the arrow keys to make the selection expand in that direction. It may make it easy to select a return & a space character. You can then copy that & paste it into the find search & replace fields.

Personally I think the image you just posted looks correct, the paragraph marks seem to be in the correct places - are you sure you didn't already find & replace those items?

I don't know why pages removes your styling, franky I don't use it often enough to tell why. I would try TextEdit to see if it is just Pages making a mess with it's styling.

As for the duplicate paragraph marks, you will need to find & replace multiple ones, e.g. find 3 repeating paragraph marks & replace with one - rinse & repeat until it is in better shape.

I'm a little confused by your first post - you said you used Acrobat Pro to make it editable, copied & pasted from there to Pages, in your last post you said you didn't use Acrobat - only one of those can be correct ?