formatting imported text in Pages

[Jerry1]

I am importing (copy & paste) text into a new document in Pages. There are paragraph commands at the end of each line, visible by clicking on Show Invisibles under the View tab. When I try to format the text, I get weird results like single words on a line. If I remove the "P's" at the end of each line manually, that solves the problem; everything then acts as it should. I tried using "find and replace" but that does not work because it removes all the invisibles so you get one long sentence with no space between words. I tried using TextEdit to remove unwanted formatting commands, as found in another link, but that did not work either. Any suggestions on how to remove all the "P's"? I have a 50 page document to reformat so doing this manually is nuts.

 

[pm-r]

I wonder if TextWrangler wouldn't be a better and easier choice to use instead of TextEdit???
http://www.barebones.com/?ref=AboutTextWrangler
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11009/textwrangler

But doesn't Pages have an option to ignore any formatting or some such when pasting or importing text???

 

[chscag]

I am importing (copy & paste) text into a new document in Pages. There are paragraph commands at the end of each line, visible by clicking on Show Invisibles under the View tab. When I try to format the text, I get weird results like single words on a line. If I remove the "P's" at the end of each line manually, that solves the problem; everything then acts as it should. I tried using "find and replace" but that does not work because it removes all the invisibles so you get one long sentence with no space between words. I tried using TextEdit to remove unwanted formatting commands, as found in another link, but that did not work either. Any suggestions on how to remove all the "P's"? I have a 50 page document to reformat so doing this manually is nuts.

Pages is a pain when importing another document or even copying and pasting. Here's what I found that works... Whatever it is that you're importing, make sure you change it to plain text otherwise you will be stuck with whatever format the import is in. It sounds like you're attempting to import text from another word processor program such as Word or an older version of Pages. What happens with that is you will be stuck with the paragraph marks and other hidden formatting. This can be especially difficult when importing from Word which uses the paragraph marks to denote formatting. Just change whatever you're importing to plain text and it will line up with your Pages document. (Another reason why I do not like Pages for any kind of serious word processing work.)

 

[Dysfunction]

Cmd + Opt +Shift + v is paste and match style. Try that

 

[pm-r]

Cmd + Opt +Shift + v is paste and match style. Try that

WOW, is that ever a good suggestion!! Thanks, I never bothered to try or understand how that included "match style" part worked.

And to make it even better, do a google search and maybe add a keyboard shortcut depending on application etc. and depending on the suggestion hit…

https://www.google.ca/search?client...&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=5DnSVuz0CPG_-AOGmqGYBg




- Patrick
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[Rod]

Cmd + Opt +Shift + v is paste and match style. Try that [/QUOTE
Unfortunately I tried it with Pages and it doesn't work for copied web page content. What it Does do is allows pasting of web page dialogue content into Open Office, something I could not do before.

 

[chscag]

Cmd + Opt +Shift + v is paste and match style. Try that [/QUOTE
Unfortunately I tried it with Pages and it doesn't work for copied web page content. What it Does do is allows pasting of web page dialogue content into Open Office, something I could not do before.

Unfortunately this does not work when pasting into Pages from some other word processors which is why I advised the OP to use plain text to import. That always works but it does require some work on your part to then manually match the style of the document you imported it to. I do a lot of importing from PDF documents to Word and sometimes Pages. Pages actually does better than Word when importing from PDF but it still requires manually going through the document to match style.

 

[Dysfunction]

Unfortunately this does not work when pasting into Pages from some other word processors which is why I advised the OP to use plain text to import. That always works but it does require some work on your part to then manually match the style of the document you imported it to. I do a lot of importing from PDF documents to Word and sometimes Pages. Pages actually does better than Word when importing from PDF but it still requires manually going through the document to match style.

Yea, you have to play with it. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes.. not so much...

I do far too much documentation these days. Although, I generally avoid pages.. I use Keynote like it's going out of style. Often times, I'm stuck using Sublime as in intermediary location.