Pages: find and replace multiple Replace page break in Pages

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Level 1

10 points

Pages: find and replace multiple Replace page break in Pages

I have several Pages (6.2) docs (converted PDFs) with many unwanted page breaks. But - despite reading about 10 answers to similar questions online - I can't work out how to Find / Replace page breaks in Pages! Several answers seem to indicate that you can Show Invisibles, select a Page Break, and then paste that into the Find field. Well, I can't. I can select (highlight) a page break, but it won't paste. And I can't do the obvious thing, which is to insert a page break into the find field. Nor is there any menu for selecting hidden characters within the find/replace interface, as far as I can see.

As an aside, I love Pages on the whole but this side of the program seems bizarre to me - this sort of thing should be basic, intuitive, and obvious, and it isn't.

MacBook Air, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Jun 16, 2017 10:39 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Yellowbox

Level 7

21,939 points

Jun 17, 2017 6:04 AM in response to rich789

Hi Rich,

In Pages 5 (and continuing into Pages 6) a different approach was introduced. We can no longer select a non-printing character, copy and paste into the Find or replace field.

The approach now is to:

select and Use Selection for Find (command e) and

select and Use Selection for Replace (no keyboard shortcut).

Command f to bring up the Find/Replace box.

This works on all text, not just non-printing characters.

"Use Selection" is something we must adapt to.

A little testing shows these codes (backslash, not slash) appear in the Find field. Similarly in the Replace field.

Newline: \n

Page break: \p

Column break: \c

Section break: no visible characters in the Find field.

Regards,

Ian.

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,446 points

Jun 16, 2017 2:54 PM in response to rich789

If I read your post correctly, you used some nameless tool to convert PDF into Pages document format, and inherited a bunch of extra undesirable formating characters (e.g. paragraph marks).

Suppose I have a Pages document that has extra paragraph marks (¶ are just really newline characters). In the following screen capture from Pages v6.2, I double-click to select the unwanted pilcrow, press the shift key, and then single click its predecessor. I then press cmd+E to place the '\n\n' string in the Find field, and the replacement is just a single newline, so '\n'.

I have already clicked on the gear icon to arrive at these settings:

And now, I click the > button to get the first match, and observe the replace candidates highlighted in light-gray:

And then I can click Replace All (or just Replace and >) to step through the selections, and arrive at:

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Answer 3

rich789 Author

Level 1

10 points

Jun 16, 2017 2:54 PM in response to richard grant

Great - it works. Thank you. (And this suggests I may have just misunderstood a less clear explanation of the same, that I saw elsewhere.)

Follow up question: still, it's WEIRD that this is necessary, and so unclear from within Pages itself - it's like going back to DOS or something! Is there a list somewhere of similar funky codes (/p, /n) that you're supposed to use here?

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Answer 4

Jun 16, 2017 2:54 PM in response to rich789

Hi Rich,

I think this will work: After showing invisibles and selecting the page break, type Command-E. I believe this should populate the Find field, so that when you select Edit > Find... (or type Command-F), you'll see the symbol for page break there. Now when you run the search it should work properly.

If this works, it is entirely owing to the wisdom of the regulars on this forum.

Cheers

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