Pages: How to remove multiple section breaks?

[HandyMac]

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.

 

[Slartibart]

I assume that the PDF was converted to (ASCII) text? I recommend doing the cleaning of the text file removing pagebreak codes etc. using e.g., BBEdit in free mode and after that importing it into Pages and do the layouting/type setting.

 

[HandyMac]

I assume that the PDF was converted to (ASCII) text? I recommend doing the cleaning of the text file removing pagebreak codes etc. using e.g., BBEdit in free mode and after that importing it into Pages and do the layouting/type setting.

Thanks for your response. No, the PDF was converted to a .docx file in A5 format, which I opened in Pages and converted to .pages as half-letter size portrait (which I've added to the Page Setup menu). So the basic .rtf type formatting (font, size, centering, etc.) is preserved and I don't have to recreate that.

I did try converting the PDF into text, and it produced 119 .txt files (one per page of the original PDF), and one .txt file combining them all, which doesn't seem to include the section breaks. But the .docx works fine.

I usually seem to get quicker/better help here than at Apple Discussions, but in this case a kind user there provided the instructions I needed: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256194211.