pages is messing me up

I have been working back and forth between different drafts of the same document and also working in materials that come from on-line sources, e.g., translation apps. Sometimes I would copy a paragraph or two from somewhere and it would turn into a messed-up version of the font it was supposed to be in. A text that Pages tells me is in Georgia would look like it was in Phosphate or some bolder-than-bold font. I would try to reset the file, change it to Geneva or whatever, but it would not get rid of the doubly bold mess.

The only was to solve this problem for sure is to copy that text and paste it into BBEdit. Doing that cleans out all formatting information. It could be save as a .TXT document. But just select-all, copy, and I can paste the resulting material into a normal Pages document. The big problem is that I lose all formatting, and when I've made materials that use two different fonts to distinguish ambiguous meanings of the same word, I have to manually go through the entire document and restore the formatting.

Lately I have been having trouble copying data from one Pages file to another. I may be working on file A and need to copy a block of text on file B. I open file B and try to select text to copy, but I can't even select text. My cursor may be poised over document B, but absolutely nothing happens.

It must be that somewhere in the formatting of File B there is a gremlin that copy-protects the file.

It seemed for a while that any second Pages file I tried to open and save from would be impenetrable, but last night I opened a file made a year ago, and there was no problem, using it as File B, to just zip over and copy out what I wanted. Something has corrupted more recent files. Sometimes I have succeeded in going to file B and exporting it as a DOCX file, and then, after opening the DOCX file I have a second copy of File B, and I usually can copy data from B to A as is normal.

I don't like Nisus.

Before Apple dumbed it down for iOS compatibility, I could look for "dog" in a special font, or in italics, or some other useful combination. I could often use that capability.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.