Why is Pages changing the font within a document?

Question

Why is Pages changing the font within a document?

I'm working in a Pages doc and recently have noticed that the font - Times New Roman 12pt - sometimes changes to Arial 11pt or 12pt without my initiating it. It happens sometimes when I'm deleting text or copying and pasting. It didn't happen until recently, and it may be because I'm working on a doc that has reached a high word count (108k) that I don't normally reach. I've heard of MS Word getting buggy after 100k words, but this is new to me. Pages is ordinarily very reliable, but for the past couple weeks this has begun to happen several times a day now (I write all day). It may have coincided with the doc reaching 100k words. Truthfully, I don't see any rhyme or reason to why it may be happening. My only guess is that I sometimes am writing new text in places where there once had been comments added that are now deleted (and comments are not in Times New Roman), so maybe an old command is still lingering somewhere?

What makes it more infuriating is that simply changing the font for the whole document doesn't work - doing a mass Times New Roman 12pt switch for all of it. It wants me to select regular or italics, and I am using a mix of both, so I certainly can't uniformly make it regular or italics for the sake of making it all Times New Roman. So at the end of this 120- or 130-page document, when it's done, I'll have to hunt down the Arial font and change it. Pages is also making it so that I'm forced to highlight only those words that are Arial, and not even include text near it that is Times New Roman. It's seriously irritating.

Has this happened to anyone else? What can I do to fix it? Very mysterious because I simply never use Arial, ever. I don't know where this ghost font is coming from. It's not as if I was working in Arial, or copying text that had been in Arial. I have to use Times New Roman 12 pt for my work, and I never use anything else.

Could it be because in other applications, like Safari or Chrome, I've copied and pasted Arial?

MacBook (13-inch), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Sep 24, 2015 8:38 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,476 points

Sep 24, 2015 9:22 AM in response to batmanbeyonce

There is no assurance that any web site that you copy/paste from is not defaulting to Arial, or Verdana. As both of these fonts are already installed in OS X, Pages will not attempt to perform font substitution, and your document has unwelcome visiting fonts.

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Answer 2

Sep 24, 2015 10:19 AM in response to VikingOSX

Sorry - I'm not copying and pasting from another application into Pages. I meant to say that I may be copying and pasting within Safari (from a website into an email), but when it comes to Pages, I only copy and paste within Pages docs, so when I'm in the app, the copying and pasting is only done in Times New Roman 12. Which is what is so strange about it all.

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Answer 3

Sep 24, 2015 4:13 PM in response to batmanbeyonce

You haven't said what version of Pages you are using, but since it is about bugginess and odd behaviour I am guessing Pages 5.5.3.

Just consider yourself lucky you can still open the document.

I would not be doing a significant amount of my work in such an unreliable single basketcase of an App.

Peter

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Answer 4

Sep 24, 2015 4:32 PM in response to PeterBreis0807

Just looked - yep, 5.5.3. So far this and one other bug - (an odd problem with comment numbering; I'm seeing "comment 23 of 14," which looks nonsensical, but which I eventually translated to mean that I had made a total of 23 comments, but only 14 still remained after deleting 9) are the only ones I've seen. Pages, even this version, has been mostly reliable.

I always forget about various versions and the difficulty or impossibility in reverting to an earlier version (I have never attempted, and I probably wouldn't want to exert the effort). I'm not the savviest end user; like a lot of people, I tend to just update software whenever an update becomes available, my assumption being that improvements - even ones I can't detect - have been made and my experience will be heightened.

I wish I could take these issues to someone directly at Apple, to get into the software and tinker with minor things. I don't have many needs from a word processing application, so because of that, I rarely find myself confronted with problems. It would be great if there were a sub-category of Apple Geniuses who dealt with software problems like this. It's not exactly a good fit for someone at a Genius Bar these days. Often, issues arise long after any warranty would have expired, and it's not a hardware or system software issue that Geniuses normally look at. (I used to work for an Apple Store.) And it's also hard to bring to a Genius because I can't always recreate the problem on the fly. This is endemic to why this is so bothersome; I never know quite when and why the font swap is happening. Perhaps Apple could one day have Geniuses in the stores who deal specifically with bugs in Apple's own non-OS software, like Pages, Numbers, Garage Band, etc. Call them Coding Geniuses, maybe! (Or does something like this exist and I don't know about it?!)

Peter, I'm hoping that I'm not in for a bad future with Pages! I've been using it regularly for about five or six years now, and not until this year did I have problems. Maybe it is 5.5.3 and another update is needed. Or maybe I should see this as a red flag that I should start shopping for new word processing applications for the future. Any suggestions?

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Answer 5

Sep 24, 2015 5:07 PM in response to batmanbeyonce

Yes stick with Pages '09 for now. For long documents I'd recommend LibreOffice [free] or NisusWriter [not]. Depends on your needs.

Next year Affinity Publisher should be out and we are expecting great things of the DTP App judging by its sister Apps.

We did run an extremely long post on all the missing features and problems with Pages 5 but gave up because it has basically gone nowhere (we are almost up to its second anniversary now) and looks like Apple will keep it that way bar a few tweaks.

The biggest problems with Pages 5 is that Apple continues to make every iteration incompatible with previous versions of OSX and previous versions of Pages and if (almost inevitably when) things go wrong there is virtually nothing you can do to rescue your document, and that is ignoring the 100+ missing and countless bugs or errant behaviour.

Peter

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Answer 6

scott122

Level 1

13 points

Nov 2, 2015 12:36 PM in response to batmanbeyonce

It is frustrating that we can't set a font style and size for an entire document in Pages. What I do is to import (copy then paste) all documents from any source through an email draft that I saved in the font and size I want. It also allows me to make plain text out of rich text with the click of the mouse. It's annoying, but it works, and doesn't take too much time.

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