Apple Pages: Make a cell span two columns

You cannot disable these swashes using the Smart Swashes section in the Format » Font » Show Fonts » Typography… window, because they're not Word Final Swashes. Those are disabled by default anyway.

What you're seeing are Line Final Swashes, applied only to the end of a line or a text run with consistent formatting.

I found no option to disable them from the Typography window or any menu option.

What seems to work is to end a line by pressing Shift-Return instead of Return.

Note that this will not end the paragraph and allow you to apply a different paragraph style to the second line, so depending on your circumstances (e.g. use in Headings), this will not be an optimal solution.

You can, for example, make the next line font size 1 and only insert a single space character. In the following example, I entered a single A character of font size 1 to the next line so it's visible as a black dot:

It's an ugly hack, but it might work for you.

It's possible to this easily outside of a table cell. To do this,

1. insert a tab between the two text, and then
2. add a tab mark on the ruler above.
3. Move the tab mark to adjust the tab width.

Doing this inside a table cell is difficult because pressing the tab key automatically advance the cursor to the next table cell. What I suggest is

1. create the tab outside the table cell, then
2. paste it inside the table cell, then
3. adjust the tab width.

I've snapshot to illustrate what I mean. Hope it helps.