I copied text from an online document that I want to include in a Pages file. It pasted with "double spacing" and I need to make it single spaced. How do I eliminate the online formatting?

Select the text.

Open the Format inspector

Choose Style

Look for "Spacing" with a popup menu beside it.

Change the settng to 1.0-Single.

If this is already the setting, go to the View menu and choose Show invisibles.

Is there a character in blue at the end of each line, and another at the beginning of the empty line following?

If so, Select and copy those characters.

Open Find/replace, and paste the copied characters into the Find box.

Type a space in the Replace with box.

Click Find next, then click Replace. Repeat a few times to see if this is going to repair and fix the issue. If so, click Replace All.

Regards,

Barry

There are two ways to show double-spaced lines on a web site within paragraph tags. And by the way, I tested this in Pages v8.1 on macOS 10.14.5:

<style>
.space2x {
  line-height: 2;
  width: 40%; /* so it will wrap early */
}
</style>

<p class="space2x">Some text reflecting n-tuple lines of double-spaced text</p>



and the old school way of making web page text double-spaced:

<p> Some text reflecting one line of text<br><br> and the next line of text<br><br></p>



If you copy and paste text from a website where double-spacing is managed by a style (as shown), then this content will copy/paste into pages as single-spaced, wrapped content.

The second example, using n-tuple HTML line breaks (<br>) causes Pages to treat each one of these <br> occurrences as a newline (or new paragraph mark), and you get multiple paragraphs that appear as double-spaced text when you paste. Selecting the text in Pages will show that the content is already single-spaced, paragraphs and attempting to set spacing to 1 has no effect.

You will have to show invisibles and edit out the extraneous paragraph marks for web text content that contains the HTML <br> syntax, as Pages will not do this automatically during a paste operation.