Turn off auto format pages

John,

This is just how things work: you can't turn it off. I suspect you'll find that other apps work like this, too, though you should certainly test that if you're determined to avoid it.

If you want to prevent the triggering of this, as it were, stylistic collapse into the previously chosen format, you could select Show Invisibles from the View menu and then take care not to select the character separating the respective blocks of styled text. You could also save some time by creating styles so as to allow speedy formatting (and reformatting).

Hi John,

With a closer observation of the behaviour, you may find that you are actually deleting the FIRST character of the non-bolded text, Doing so also removes the formatting control character that switched the format from Bold to Normal, taking away the instruction to "change format to normal".

Without that instruction, Pages follows your last (manually set) instruction to bold all text following this marker, which now includes the text after your deletion.

^ represents the "bold marker" - represents the "normal marker"

…some normal text ^Bold text starts here and continues until turned off or changed by another marker -like this one which changes the format to normal (which continues until turned off or changed by another marker).

If you then delete "like this one", you get this:

…some normal text ^Bold text starts here and continues until turned off or changed by another marker which changes the format to normal (which continues until turned off or changed by another marker).

Because you've deleted the instruction to change the text (back) to normal.

Regards,

Barry

You can Delete Forward or Backward, see which one works for you.