Plain text formatting in Pages

I am pasting plain text into Pages. When I paste, I get the plain text formatting characters (*BOLD*, _ITALICS_) when I paste. Is there away for Pages to recognize these prompts and format the text accordingly?

MacBook Pro (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Mar 26, 2025 06:45 AM

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Issue with Text Encoding When Copying from ChatGPT to Apple Pages on iPad Pro Dear Apple Support Team, I am writing to report an issue related to text encoding when copying and pasting text from ChatGPT into Apple Pages on iPad Pro 2024. While pasting text from websites or other sources works correctly, text copied directly from ChatGPT appears with encoding errors, replacing certain characters with unexpected symbols. Issue Description: • When pasting text from ChatGPT, certain characters—such as apostrophes (‘), quotation marks (“”), dashes (–), and accented letters (ā, ē, š, ķ, ž, etc.)—are replaced by incorrect symbols (e.g., â€™ instead of an apostrophe). • The same issue does not occur when copying from websites or other sources—only from ChatGPT. • This suggests that Apple Pages is misinterpreting the encoding of copied text from ChatGPT, possibly treating it as Windows-1252 or another incompatible format instead of UTF-8. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Copy any text from ChatGPT. 2. Paste it into Apple Pages on iPad Pro 2024. 3. Observe that certain characters appear incorrectly encoded. Troubleshooting Attempts: ✔ Used “Paste Without Formatting” – issue persists. ✔ Copied text via Apple Notes or Google Docs before pasting into Pages – works correctly, but is not a convenient long-term solution. ✔ Changed fonts within Pages (Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman) – no improvement. ✔ Verified language settings in Pages (set to English UK) – issue persists. Possible Cause: It seems that Pages is not properly recognizing the UTF-8 encodingof text copied from ChatGPT, leading to misinterpretation of special characters. This issue does not occur when copying from websites, which suggests that Pages is handling text encoding inconsistently depending on the source. Request for Investigation and Fix: 🔹 Ensure that Apple Pages correctly interprets UTF-8 text encodingfrom all sources, including ChatGPT. 🔹 Provide an option for “Paste as Plain Text” in iPadOS Pages, similar to the “Paste and Match Style” feature available on macOS. 🔹 If encoding conflicts arise, consider adding an option for users to manually select the encoding format when pasting text. This issue significantly impacts usability for users who frequently copy and paste text from AI-generated sources like ChatGPT into Apple Pages. A fix or workaround would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and support. I look forward to your response. Best regards, Eduards.
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2 replies

VikingOSX

Level 10

122,118 points

Mar 26, 2025 11:29 AM in response to rhodesm07

You are not pasting plain text, but text with multi-markdown styling syntax in it. Pages is not designed to detect and convert multi-markdown styling hints. But all is not lost…

Copy the multi-markdown content to the clipboard, and run the following Shortcuts workflow to convert the multi-markdown content into Rich text. Then paste that Rich Text into Pages and you will have bold and italic styling.

and after pasting into Pages v14.3 on Sequoia v15.3.2:

when the following was copied to the clipboard beforehand:

The bold and italicized words could also be surrounded by double underscores.

VikingOSX

Level 10

122,118 points

Mar 26, 2025 01:00 PM in response to VikingOSX

Errata:

"converted to markdown." should read "converted from markdown."

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Plain text formatting in Pages