Preserving UTF-8 formatting in Pages and Notes on Mac

Apple's Notes has no Save facility, only an export to PDF. When one selects Pages Export To > Plain Text, it is ASCII text without any formatting or UTF-8 encoding.

The only means in Pages to preserve formatting is to export to PDF, RTF, or maybe Word (depending on the content). Some Pages rich content is preserved when copied to the clipboard, but what survives pasting would depend on what data the recipient application allows to be received from the clipboard.

Unlike Pages, MS Word v16.92 allows one to save as plain text, but an interim dialog allows one to choose UTF-8/UTF-16 encoding and line feeds. Although Spotlight identifies this saved document as plain text, the UNIX file utility shows it as plain text with a UTF-8 character set. Paragraph structure and spacing are retained.

24redherring wrote:

How to preserve formatting, edit in Pages or Notes, and save in UTF-8 formatting

What exactly are you trying to "preserve"? UTF-8 is an encoding for characters, and is normally what is used by Apple apps and saved as such. If by "formatting" you are talking about font styling (bold, italic, etc) or page structure, or file type, that's totally separate from encoding.

Are you working in languages other than English? Is the some specific problem you are having creating or sharing things produced with Pages or Notes?