How to remove multiple section breaks in Pages

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Level 2

490 points

How to remove multiple section breaks in Pages

How to remove multiple section breaks?

macOS 11.7 Big Sur, Pages 12.1

I'm working with a text document in Pages, converted from a PDF by the very useful Online PDF Tools (https://www.i2pdf.com). It was in landscape letter-size format; I'm redoing it as portrait half-letter size. Each page has a half page of text, followed by a section break.

The document is over 100 pages, so there are over 100 section breaks. Is there a way to delete them all? I tried copying a section break and pasting it into Find & Replace, but the function couldn't see it, said it didn't find any.

Some apps have ASCII codes that can be used to find formatting elements, but I can't find anything about such codes in Pages.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.7

Posted on Nov 21, 2025 5:41 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,036 points

Nov 22, 2025 2:21 AM in response to HandyMac

Open that document in Pages and enable View menu > Show Invisibles. Scroll downward until you encounter the first section break. It will look like this:

Double-click to select it. On the Edit menu, choose Find > Use Selection For Find. Then press ⌘F to open the Find panel. The Find entry will appear blank and you can leave the Replace blank or put a newline \n there to replace the section break with a paragraph mark. Click once on the right arrow of the Find panel.

You will see that Find has now found all of your section breaks, and you can then click Replace All to be rid of them.

PDF content appears to flow as though you were looking at a word processing document, but instead, each line is laid down with a newline connecting it with the next. Just like a line printer. This makes PDF conversion to Pages a post-processing nightmare, and the conversion software has done you no favors with your lost productivity cleaning up the mess.

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,036 points

Nov 22, 2025 10:55 AM in response to HandyMac

See View formatting symbols on Mac > Find and Replace Formatting Symbols.

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Answer 3

HandyMac Author

Level 2

490 points

Nov 22, 2025 9:05 AM in response to VikingOSX

Many thanks, just what I needed. Deleted 115 of them in one swell foop.

"newline \n": yes, this is what I was referring to as "ASCII codes for formatting elements". Is there a list of them for Pages somewhere?

"…each line is laid down with a newline connecting it with the next. Just like a line printer." Don't know exactly what this means, but I've noticed before when copying text from a PDF that each line has a line break after it, which can be an annoyance. However, in this case the conversion software does seem to have removed them, as the text flows normally and I can now select a paragraph by triple-clicking. I can see why it would not automatically remove section breaks, as those may sometimes be desired to keep.

Thanks again, big help.

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