Pages Find & Replace mistakenly finds page numbers for double spaces.

In follow-up, when I enter two spaces into the Find field and a single space into the Replace field, it does illuminate the single space between the Page n of nn, but the Replace All does not touch that martian, just collapses the double-spaces to single.

I even tested this premise with an AppleScript that runs a Find/Replace on deliberately double-spaced areas of the body text, and they are fixed without any collateral damage to the footer.

Word has a far advanced Find and Replace capability than does Pages. Unsurprising since Pages is neither a Word clone, nor ever designed to compete with Word.

I have Pages v15.4, Office 2024 for Mac, and LibreOffice 26.8.1 installed on my Mac. Sometimes, when I need to perform Find and Replace functionality unsupported in Pages, I will export to Word, then use the advanced tools in either of the other applications, before reopening that revised Word document in Pages.

Probably little consolation that I sent feedback to the Pages product team about the double-space Find/Replace behavior in Pages that you experienced, and that I was able to reproduce here.

Pages cannot be used to find just two successive spaces with a Replace All of one space.

I would temporarily increase the enlargement to 150% to make those double-spaces more visible. Use the same Find/Replace as you are using, but this time, you will need to individually click the > button and Replace for each occurrence of double spaces, and ignore other selections. That is as good as it gets with Pages when chasing down double-space occurrences.

Just to add to my previous comments, in Microsoft Word v16.114 or LibreOffice Writer v26.8.1.1, you can enter two spaces in the Find field and one space in the Replace field, and a subsequent Replace All does exactly that. No extra martian spaces to distract you.

Tested: macOS 27.0.1

I've used all sorts of search and replace options in Microsoft Word over many years. Hence it feels like a very odd backward step in Pages!

There is so much I like about Pages but it still catches me out at times.

Thank you.

In other circumstances I might have tried that. But the formatting of the document simply does not travel from Pages to anything else - except PDF. Though it would serve as a way of identifying the double-spaces, allowing me to manually edit in Pages.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

.

Sort-of glad it is not just me.

“When I use a double-space,” Apple said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”