Several readers have asked about what appears to be a missing feature in Pages 5 compared to the previous version: finding special “invisible” items, such as tab, a carriage return (at the end of a paragraph), page break insertion, and the like. It seems like you can type a space character in the Find dialog (Edit > Find) and nothing else that can’t be seen.
Apple seems to emphasize this in its online help: “All visible content in the document—the main body text, headers and footers, tables, text boxes, shapes, footnotes and endnotes, and comments—is included in the search.” Visible content, it says.
Invisible characters can be displayed with View > Show Invisibles.
It’s often useful to be able to search against hidden characters in documents you receive from elsewhere, where you need to remove extra line returns, tabs, spaces, or other oddities that would be time-consuming to hunt and fix by hand.
However, there is a non-obvious workaround in Pages 5 to find those critters, and a second alternative if it’s really bothering you.
First, how to get around this within Pages 5:
Pages 5's Find box has the invisible characters in it, but can’t show them.
Now the Find dialog has that sequence in its Find field, even though it’s both invisible and can’t be modified. You can see that it works by the found count in gray at the right side of the Find field.
The other option is to leave Pages 5 entirely.
TextEdit offers a more advanced option for finding and replacing special characters.
You can edit directly in the file and when you save, it updates in Word format. You can then open that file directly within Pages 5 when you’re finished. You may have to mess a bit with formatting after this round-trip.
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