Find and Replace

[dfaulks]

I have a Pages document that is 'full' of "soft" carriage returns.
I wish to change those to a "hard" return.
A copy and Paste of these 'hidden' symbols does not work.
Nowhere can I find what to place in the "find" portion of the Find and Replace window.
Need also the hard return.

 

[DaveS]

Dick,
According to this: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH23732?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US
a soft carriage return is Shift-Return and a hard one, just Return. Have you tried that?
Dave

 

[dfaulks]

Dave:
That works in the body of a Pages document.
My problem is with knowing what to enter into the "Find" function in order to make it find the soft returns in a document.
Dick

 

[DaveS]

I see. What I found so far may only be for "hard returns", but using \n in the search field will find those. I don't have a sample of text with "soft returns" to experiment on. Can you send me an innocuous paragraph with both that I can try? Or perhaps the \n will find what you want.
Dave

 

[dfaulks]

Hi Dave:
Attached file may explain.

 

[DaveS]

Sorry, Dick, but I'm stymied. According to one post I found, find and replace of formatting characters is no longer supported in Pages after v5. One suggestion was to copy and paste the document, but I had no luck in LibreOffice, either. Perhaps Word, but I assume you don't have that to hand. Good luck.
Dave

 

[chas_m]

As Dave noted above, \n (<-- note that this is a backslash and NOT a forward slash!) will find hard returns, and \i will find soft returns.

If you ever need to find some other characters that are normally invisible, this is how you do it:

1. View Invisibles (from the View menu)
2. Highlight the now-visible special character you wish to use for the Find.
3. Go to the Edit menu --> Find --> Use Selection for Find (or just press command-e)
4. Press command-f for the find window, and you will see the backslash character auto-pasted into the Find field.

For keyboard mavens: Shift-Command-I (show invisibles), highlight the special character, Command-e, Command-f

 

[dfaulks]

Am working on another document (after two weeks of no email uploading possible) and came up against the same problem. Decided to look here and … Voila! … there's Chas's response, which is, \i (backslash-i).

Have to offer, though, Chas, that the Edit menu in this version of Pages calls for command-shift-e.

Works great. THANK YOU !!!!

Dick