How do I paste without line breaks in the Pages app?

And here is an Apple Shortcuts solution that you use after you have copied the text from the PDF to the clipboard. It takes that clipboard text, strips the paragraph (newlines) from each line of content and then replaces it back on the clipboard. Then you can paste it into Pages with a single paragraph mark at the end of the text.

Click here to prompt the Shortcuts application on Sequoia, Sonoma, or Ventura to install Remove Paragraph Marks from PDF Text shortcut. You use it by selecting the text in the PDF that you want to copy/paste into Pages. Then from the Preview Services menu, at the bottom, you will see the list of Shortcuts that act on the clipboard content:

Once the Shortcut has run, you can then simple paste into Pages.

You may need to visit System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions > Finder and enable the following before it will appear in the above Services listing.

Copying and pasting the text of your post in Safari 18.5 and using either Paste, or Paste and Match Style into a blank Pages document does not introduce any paragraph marks (e.g line breaks) but does end the pasted text with a no-break space (e.g. U+00A0 or ·̂ ) when seen with show invisibles.

Copy and pasting text from a non-Apple application may not write content to the clipboard as you would expect.

PDFs are not organized internally as would be word processing documents or web pages. When you select a block of text as in this example from a random PDF:

the text surrounded by white lines will individually paste into pages as single paragraphs, not as one large paragraph ending with a paragraph mark. In Pages, it won't matter if it is a Paste, or Paste with Matching Style. Every line will end with a paragraph mark.

You can fix this every line ending with a paragraph mark by pasting into a Text box, selecting the text in it, and then launching the Find/Replace tool to remove the individual paragraph marks. Afterward, you can select the text in the Text box and paste into your main document body and then remove the Text box. Awkward, but necessary to restrict the scope of the Find/Replace of paragraph marks to the Text box and not your entire document.

awrad64: You are not the only one. This suddenly changed for me, too, and it has added a lot of editing work into my workflow.

I copy several pages of text at a time and control-shift-V paste into a document. All along, I have been copying from the same set of PDFs and pasting into the same editor. I thought, initially, that something had changed in how the PDFs were created, but have gone back to copy from the exact same files as before: a few months ago the paste did not insert line breaks (only with a paragraph break), and now it does insert line breaks.

I do not know what changed. I assume something along with an OSX update. It is a huge bummer for me, though. I am crunching through and editing about 30 pages per week, and this is a significant addition to the editing time.

Regardless of what you call them, in Pages paragraph marks and ordinary line breaks are still a newline character.

If you are on Monterey or later, you could use the Quick Action I created above that removes all of the newlines from the pasted clipboard and then puts that result back on the clipboard for a more normal paste into Pages.

Alternatively, and with more effort than the Quick Action, you should be opening those PDFs in a recent (> 16.31) version of MS Word. That will convert the PDF text to Word docx and then your copy paste of selected Word content will get into Pages without the newline character after every line of text, or without need of the preceding Quick Action solution.

It all depends on how the pdf was created originally. My experience is that mostly, you'll get the line breaks.