removing indentation from "body" text in Pages?

[ryubyss]

my problem: text marked as "body" in Pages has a mandatory indentation at the beginning of the body of text. Pages does allow for the addition and removal of indentation, but not in this case. I have looked in settings and not figured out how to fix this, though I can change the default font and text size of "body" text.

EDITED
how to delete this thread?

 

[Ben J.]

Place the cursor before the first character of the paragraph, hit 'delete', the paragraph should go away, then hit shift-delete which means 'new line', but no new paragraph. Just drawing on decades old desktoppublishing-memories here, but might be a fix of sorts.

 

[Nermal]

then hit shift-delete which means 'new line', but no new paragraph

I'm not at my Mac right now, but I think you might mean Shift-Return, not Shift-Delete.

 

[Ben J.]

I'm not at my Mac right now, but I think you might mean Shift-Return, not Shift-Delete.

Correct. Sorry. Thanks.

 

[ryubyss]

thanks! I hoped to find a fix that would allow me to not have to individually and manually do it. you know, set things up so that they wouldn't indent in the first place.

 

[ipaqrat]

thanks! I hoped to find a fix that would allow me to not have to individually and manually do it. you know, set things up so that they wouldn't indent in the first place.

Shift-return is a bad fix, not actually helpful for layouts of any length or complexity. The longer the document, the worse it gets, as paragraph spacing, pagination, widow/orphan are ALL BORKED.

You need to edit the Style Sheet "Body", under Indents, First. This will fix ALL paragraphs of the body style.

You can make as many more style sheets as you want, each with custom settings.

 

[NoBoMac]

Do ^^^this to create your own template(s) and use them to create anything new.

 

[BotchQue]

EDITED
how to delete this thread?

Naw, don't do that. The info provided here helps a few of us out!

And, to add my own hint: I copy/paste a lot of recipes from ewetube food channels into a Pages doc, to save and cook (I LOVE retirement!)
Pasting often includes all kinds of wonky breaks, photos, adverts, etc; I now open a clean Pages doc, then type in the Title/source, on one line. Hit Return twice, then hit CMD-OPT-SHFT "v"; this pastes what's on your clipboard, in the exact format/font/size of your title line, which leaves out the page breaks, photos, "List" garbage, adverts, etc, from MOST recipes (not all) and just a quick step-thru lets me clean up any remaining goobers. It works very well for me.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Copy all of the affected text out, paste into Text Edit, "make plain text", copy plain text out of Text Edit, Paste into Pages document. That should strip all of the invisible "gunk" out leaving you with simple text and probably fix the problem.

 

[ryubyss]

Copy all of the affected text out, paste into Text Edit, "make plain text", copy plain text out of Text Edit, Paste into Pages document. That should strip all of the invisible "gunk" out leaving you with simple text and probably fix the problem.

I would have done that, but stripping away formatting would have taken away italics, bold, etc., which in this case I wanted to preserve.

 

[ryubyss]

Naw, don't do that. The info provided here helps a few of us out!

yeah, sorry! me getting overly self-conscious!

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

OK, open the text in the original app (Word? or whatever) on the original platform (PC? or whatever). If all looks good there- that is the indents aren't showing there but bold, italics, etc are- export from that platform as RTF file. That will simplify the file format down to the basics. Then try opening the RTF version in Pages.

If that still has the problem, run the content through various text "cleaners" that strips out hidden formatting but leaves visible formatting alone. I use a free tool called WordService from the App Store, which then makes tools like those available in the "Services" menu item. Several of those tools can easily strip out some hidden "kludge" that may be causing this effect.

And with some of the text selected, you might also want to check both of these to be sure neither shows a number greater than 0...

That second one can- in some situations- show no bullet but be indenting a line anyway because- as shown there, Indent bullet or text has a number in it (.25 inch in that example).

And if all that has failed and you still have the problem, create a one page copy of the document, replace any sensitive text with Lorem Ipsum gibberish, save it as a file that one of us can download and open and then we will be able to figure it out.