Undocumented Proprietary File Format in Pages 5

The new Pages 5 file package format contains binary .iwa files that seem unreadable by other applications. This makes it very difficult or even impossible to recover file content if you are on a computer without Pages 5 or if Apple one day abandons the program. This is a big shift from the XML based file structure of Pages '09 (4.3) and earlier, which at least could be read by text editors, and which in theory could be recovered.

One important reason not to use Pages for crucial documents has always been the proprietary file format. I do not have a single Pages file on my hard disk without a backup in more widely used formats, like doc, docx, rtf, txt, PDF or whatever makes most sense for the file.

However, the new file format makes it doubly important not to use Pages to create files for long term storage.

My recommendation is simply: Never, ever, repeat, absolutely never, create a Pages file without a backup in another file format.

More information about the new file format can be found at GitHub and PixelEnvy.

Update 2019: Since some time, one has been able to access Pages documents through iCloud. From there one can download the documents in the cloud to for example Word format to access it on other platforms.

Note: this blog is not actively updated any more. Any information can be obsolete. I updated this entry only because the stats show that it is one of the more popular posts.

Some Less Good News with Pages 5

Update for the list below: Apple have for once admitted that things aren't perfect. Some of the removed functionality will come back according to a support article. 

They say that the following features will come back within 6 months:

• Customize toolbar
• Vertical ruler
• Improved alignment guides
• Improved object placement
• Import of cells with images
• Improved word counts
• Keyboard shortcuts for styles
• Manage pages and sections from the thumbnail view

The List of Removed Features

With Pages 5, there is some disappointing news for about every user. A large amount of functionality is gone. This is a rough list of some things that are gone. It was compiled by Peter Breis in the instructive Apple Discussion forum with the help of other posters. For an updated list, see IWorkTipsandTricks.

1. Select non-contiguous text
2. Outline view
3. Customizable Toolbar
4. 135 templates
5. Capture pages/sections
6. Drag reorganize pages
7. Duplicate pages
8. Delete page
9. Manage Pages
10. Subscript/superscript buttons
11. Select all instances of a Style
12. Retain zoom level of document
13. Facing pages
14. Layout Breaks
15. Layout Margins
16. Endnotes
17. Media Inspector links to iPhoto library on external drive
18. Media Inspector links to Aperture Library
19. Alignment Guides
20. Styles Drawer
21. Merge Fields
22. Drag and Drop VCards
23. Default Start Up page
24. Vertical Ruler
25. Style Function key shortcuts
26. Bookmarks and Links
27. Images within Tables
28. Mathtype/Grapher Equations/Formulae within Pages
29. Import Styles
30. Clean Import of older .pages formatting
31. User Guide
32. Search Sidebar
33. Open Type features
34. Textbox linking
35. Background Object selectable
36. Storyboards
37. Text to Tables
38. Tables to Text
39. Tables in Headers/Footers
40. Word export to iCloud
41. Export to .txt or .rtf
42. Multiple Comments view
43. T.O.C. clean numbering
44. Character Styles  ?
45. List Styles   ?
46. Selective formating in Character Styles
47. Insert File Name
48. Search in Media Browser
49. Bullet points in comments
50. Search comments
51. Two up view
52. Paste and keep style
53. Accented characters in Footer
54. Mail Merge
55. Mask with shapes other than rectangle
56. Find & Replace special characters eg paragraph returns

Some Good News with Pages 5

With Pages 5, there is some good news for people who write in Chinese or Japanese: One can finally add phonetic guides (furigana) in Pages, both in Pages for Mac OS X and in Pages for iOS.

• In Pages for Mac OS X, go to Format > Phonetic Guide Text.
• In Pages for iOS, highlight the word you want to add the text to > Click on the Right Arrow > Select Phonetics.

In both cases, you get a list of proposed phonetic guides for both Japanese and Chinese, including bopomofo: ちゅうごく, チュウゴク, zhōngguó, chuugoku, ㄓㄨㄥㄍㄨㄛˊ.

There is also some good news for writers of Hebrew and Arabic and other Right-To-Left languages, because that finally works too.

Pages 5 and Pages '09 and this blog

Pages 5 is out there with a long list of interesting new problems to solve and a few new features. I cannot promise that this blog will be updated to reflect Pages 5. It was easy to keep the blog reasonably up to date when Apple stayed away from changing the product. However, with Pages 5, much more time would be needed to handle all the new problems, and time is not anything I have much of.

Pages and iCloud - an Unlikely Winner against Google Drive and Skydrive

Even though I have assembled quite a lot of information, questions and quirks about Apples word processor Pages, it is not a program I feel particularly connected with. It is a word processor from Apple. It does what it should do - some of the time. It does some things elegantly and many things not at all. It still after eight years has some pretty big limitations, like poor support for Arabic and Hebrew.

Every now and then I try to find a better tool, and often I find myself using MS Word or TextEdit for local files.

As time has gone on, more and more people talk about the cloud, and one would think that the big software giants of today had figured out how to make it work properly. I decided to compare Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive and iCloud, thinking that anyone of them probably will be fine for me. It turned out that none of them has made the cloud work properly yet, but the one with least limitations was Apple's Pages.

What I want seems simple enough. I want to edit text. Not pictures. Not fancy layout. Not tables or embedded movies. I do not need collaboration, revisions, comments or versions. Just text. I want to edit the text:

• on a Mac.
• on a Windows PC.
• on a tablet.
• on a phone.
• in a browser.
• off line.
• on line with synchronisation with a cloud.

Skydrive

Microsoft Skydrive is something that is so close but not at all there. To use Skydrive on a Mac, you download an application called Skydrive from Microsoft. It is free. You also buy MS Office, which is not at all free. To use Skydrive to edit texts on your Android or iOS phone, you need to sign up to Microsoft Office 365, which costs $10 a month. On the paper, Office 365 is a good deal. You get the latest version of Office for 5 computers, Macs or PCs, and you can use it with your phone. However, if you already have MS Office, $10 a month is quite expensive for something Apple and Google give you for free. I heard that one can edit Office files without problems on a Windows phone, but that is not the phone I have.

And then there are the bugs.

I got some problems with Skydrive and followed a link in Skydrive for Mac, which recommended me to download Skydrive for PC to my Mac. Skydrive for PC is not compatible with Windows XP, so it would not work even on my Windows machine, and it is of course even less compatible with Mac OS X. I found a link to Skydrive for Mac and reinstalled the latest version. The program then hang itself in an infinite loop, where it asked me if I wanted to restart it over and over again. Even restarting my Mac did not help. When I finally managed to clean up the installation enough to make Skydrive start, it refused to synchronise, which is its main purpose. It showed the sync symbol for five minutes, proudly explaining that it was uploading a 36k document. Once it was done, I verified the synchronisation, and it had failed.

The two main problems with Skydrive are:

1. It is pricy.

2. It is unusable.

But I give it that the web interface to edit documents is decent and it plays reasonably well with a local copy of Word, if you are connected to the internet.

Google Drive

Google Drive, which used to be called Google Docs was one of the first major cloud office suits. It works well on line, it is a good way to share a document between several connected devices.

My problem with Google Drive is off line editing. I can edit documents using my iPhone when it is connected, but when I am abroad without roaming, when I am in an airplane, or when I have not paid my internet provider fee, I am stuck. I can read documents off line, but I cannot edit them.

Using Google Drive for PC or Mac is slightly better. One can edit documents when one is not connected. One can even create new ones. However, one cannot export them to other formats when one is off line, so if you want to make a modification using some feature in MS Word, you have to first find an internet connection.

iCloud

A few years ago, I would not have bet much on Pages being a major part of my text editing life, and I would not have bet on Apple being able to do anything properly in the cloud.

However, it turns out that Pages for iOS and Pages for Mac both save files locally and sync them with iCloud. I can create a document on my disconnected iPad, connect my iPad and sync and update the document on my iPhone and finish it on my Mac when I get home. I can even use a browser and update it on a PC (but without any local storage). That's basically all I need.

Conclusion

My very personal conclusion which applies to me, is that iCloud wins. If I had to limit myself to one cloud, it would be iCloud. If I can use two clouds, I would use iCloud and Google Drive. If I can use three, I would use iCloud and Google Drive and nothing more.

That is the state of today. I do not necessarily recommend you to use iCloud, because your needs may be different from mine. Regardless of what anyone uses today, I hope Google, Apple and Microsoft will all improve in the future. Even Skydrive has potential if Microsoft just decides to fix its bugs and release it properly to non-Windows users.

That is my second wish. That iCloud shall work fine on Android and Windows and Linux. That Skydrive shall work on Android and iOS and that Google Drive will get decent support for off line editing on all platforms.

Once that is done, perhaps the different systems can start working with each other instead of isolated in their own little clouds up in the blue.

Pages - Save As...

In most applications, you can save an open file under a new file name with File > Save as... or shift-command-S.

In recent versions of Pages and TextEdit, the command is File > Duplicate > File (again!) > Save.

There is no keyboard shortcut for this, unless you customise your keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts.

This admittedly makes Save as... more cumbersome to use, but it is a (somewhat) logical consequence of the Autosave feature of Pages, which is so automatic that you never should have to save a file again. Almost.

Can Pages create epub files?

Yes! From version 9.0.4 released in August 2010.

With the advent of iBook and the iPad, the epub file format is getting more useful, and luckily Apple released the functionality. This is one of the few major points where Pages is distinctly superior to MS Word.

Instructions, recommendation (and limitations) can be found at Apple's support site.

How do I batch transfer several Pages documents from my iPad or iPhone?

The easiest way seems to be to use iCloud. Activate it on the iPad with Settings > iCloud > Documents & Data. This will automatically send all your documents to Apple, and you can then download them on your Mac.

On the Mac or PC:

1. Go to http://www.icloud.com. 
2. Sign in with your Apple ID.
3. Click on iWork.
4. Command-click (ctrl-click) on all the documents you want to download.
5. Do NOT click on any of the many "Download" buttons.
6. Click on the wheel in the upper right corner and select "Download document..." 

Pages for iPad cannot create usable PDF files

Some PDF files from Pages for iPad are distorted or unreadable when opened in Adobe Reader. They display much better in Preview, but as Windows users do not have Preview, this is not much of consolation. You can follow this thread to see other people having the same problem. If Apple releases a fix, the thread is likely to be updated by happy users.

There seem to be some dependency on which fonts are used. Trying out most of the fonts installed on my iPad, hardly anyone displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. However, all except Heiti and Zapfino were readable. Heiti and Zapfino displayed as dots: ••••


One font actually displayed as it should, and that was Apple Gothic. It is a mystery why that one of all fonts worked.

Most other fonts displayed as Adobe Sans MM. To get a consistent layout, you can try using Arial or Helvetica in Pages for iPad, as they also are sans serif fonts. You can also try Apple Gothic.

It is nevertheless good to validate the file in Adobe Reader. The final display may depend on your system or the layout of the document.


A list of embedded fonts in Adobe Reader. File > Properties > Fonts.

Pages stuck on iPad

If you start Pages on an iPad, you may get stuck without any controls and no obvious way out.

If you are in landscape mode, the simple trick is to rotate the iPad 90 degrees to portrait mode, and the controls will appear.

For other issues see: Apple's support,

A tempting alternative - Lotus Symphony for Mac OS X?

I just realised that there was another office suit out there apart from the "obvious" ones, iWork, MS Office and OpenOffice/NeoOffice.

IBM has their own version of OpenOffice, called Lotus Symphony. It is free, as in "it costs no money", but unfortunately it costs time and pain.

I gave it just a few minutes, and found a rather nice looking UI and loads of bugs.


Just finding the installation file on their web site took for ever, and once it had downloaded the 212 Megabyte installation file, it managed to lock up Firefox, so I had to kill the browser.

The installation procedure suggests you associate open document files to Lotus Symphony. I did not do that, and Symphony decided not to tell the OS that it can open the files it creates (open document .odt for word processing). In other words, when I double click a file created by Symphony, it will open in OpenOffice or TextEdit. Not even right-click and "Open with..." works. You have to open the file from inside Symphony itself.

Symphony pretends to support Asiatic languages, but there are so many problems with both input and vertical script, that I would really advice against it.

Symphony actually has a decent amount of Clipart and a "Fontwork" module which is similar to MS Office's Wordart, even though Symphony's version is less flexible.

One reason to at least download Lotus Symphony, is if you want to grab some of the Clipart. You can probably find as good clipart elsewhere on the net, but here is to extract it from an installed version of Lotus Symphony, if that is what you want:

1. Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
2. Type: /Applications/Symphony.app/Contents/MacOS/shared/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.productivity.tools.gallery.common (Do not press enter!)
3. Press the tab key. This will expand the directory to its full name.
4. Type open . (Yes. With the space and the dot.)
5. Press enter. You will get a new Finder window, where you can browse for the clipart. The files are in wmf format, which can be opened by a number of applications, like OpenOffice, Adobe Illustrator, gimp, WMF Viewer for Mac, GraphicConverter and so on, but unfortunately not by Pages or Preview directly.

IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3 definitely has some potential, but they have a long, long way to go with bug fixes, before it can be considered a serious alternative to MS Office or OpenOffice.

If you are hesitating between iWork and MS Office or OpenOffice/NeoOffice, there is currently hardly any good reason to include Lotus Symphony as a fourth option.

How do I save as Word document?

Pages is not a Word replacement. If you want a product that saves Word documents, you are better off with MS Word (which costs more) or NeoOffice/OpenOffice (which cost nothing).

Pages can export to Word's doc format, but it can be annoying to always have to select and overwrite the document you already have with a new version every time you change. Besides the export is far from perfect.

If you are set on using Pages, and nothing but Pages to edit your Word documents there is a hack, which is described at leefindlow.com. That site describes very well how to do it, so I will just add a short summary here for the record.

Please, remember that Apple never intended us to do this, and anything you do slightly wrong may mess up Pages for you. Only follow the following steps if you know exactly what you are doing.

1. Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the application icon for Pages and select "Show Package Contents" from the pop-up menu.
2. Find the file Contents/info.plist. (You may want to make a backup copy of it, in case you mess up in the following steps.)
3. Open the file in an editor like Property List Editor. If you are comfortable with XML, you can also use a text editor like TextEdit or TextWrangler.
4. Look in CFBundleDocumentTypes/Document types. There you will find a list of different Document types (CFBundleTypeName).
5. Find the document type Microsoft Word document.
6. Check its associated Role (CFBundleTypeRole). By default it is set to Viewer.
7. Change the Role to Editor.
8. Find the document type Microsoft Word 97 - 2004 document.
9. Check its associated Role (CFBundleTypeRole). By default it is set to Viewer.
10. Change the Role to Editor.
11. Save the file info.plist.

From now on, when you open a Word document in Pages 3 or 4, it will be able to save the file when you simply press cmd-S.

How do I make an organisation chart or a flow chart in Pages?

One of the crucial things in making a chart is to have connector points between boxes and other objects, so the links can stay the same, even if you move the objects around.



The connector points of Pages are a little limited, but they exist.

1. Create two or more shapes. (For example: Insert > Shape > Rectangle.)
2. Make sure the shapes are floating in the Inspector > Wrap (third icon) > Floating (doesn't move with the text.
   
3. Highlight two shapes.
4. Go to Insert > Connection Line.

You can now move the objects around in Pages to fit the page layout. You can also drag the middle of the connector line to bend it. Or change line type, shadow, colour, and so on.


(Updated for Pages 9.0. Thanks for the comments pointing out that one no longer has to create the chart in Keynote!)

How do I find paragraph marks and tabs in Pages?

If you want to search for paragraph marks, tabs or other special characters in Pages, you can do that in the search dialogue (Edit > Find > Find...) using the Insert... drop down.


If you prefer to use Applescript to find this kind of items, you can use the special keywords space, tab, return, linefeed and quote, for example like this:

tell application "Pages"
 repeat with achar in characters of body text of front document
  if contents of achar = return then
   display dialog (character offset of achar as integer)
  end if
 end repeat
end tell

Keyboard Shortcuts in Pages

To quickly learn some of the keyboard shortcuts in Pages, the easiest way is to look in the menus. In the menu above, you can for example see that you use command+C to copy.

These are the symbols that are used:

⌘ is the "command" key.
⌥ is the key called "alt" or "option" depending on your keyboard.
⇧ is the shift key.
^ is the ctrl key.

However there are more keyboard shortcuts that are not necessarily available in any of the menus. Also note that they may be slightly different (or even broken) in other languages than English. Here are some examples of working shortcuts for an English keyboard:

Hold the mouse pointer over a word, and press ⌘ ^ D. This will call up a small dictionary window. If you want more information about the word, click on "more".

Type a few letters, and press ⌥ esc to get a list of words beginning with those letters. You can also use F5 for the same function.

To change to the next open Pages window, press ⌘ `.

To change to the next open application, press ⌘ tab.

To copy text or a graphic, highlight it. Then hold down ⌥ at the same time as you drag it to the place where you want to copy it.

You may have noticed that you can drag tabs around in the ruler with your mouse. However, by default they only land at certain positions. To be able to move the tabs around to any position on the ruler, hold down ⌘ at the same time as you drag.

When you try to close a modified document window, you get a dialogue asking if you want to change your changes. The three buttons each have their hidden shortcut: Return saves. Escape closes the dialogue without closing the window. ⌘ D is equivalent to "Don't save" and discards your modifications.

To get super script, like in mc², highlight a character, and press ⇧ ^ ⌘ +. (In the menu, it looks like the shortcut is simply ^⌘+. However, as the + character needs ⇧ to display, you need to add ⇧ as well. To get subscripts , like O₂, you only need to press ^⌘-).

To add an indent level to an item in a list, use ⌘ ]. To remove an indent level for a list item, use ⌘ [.

To add an indent level to an item in an outline, use tab. To remove an indent level for an outline, use ⇧ tab.

Graphics

If you change the size of a shape, you can hold down ⇧ at the same time as you drag its corners to keep the proportions between height and width.

If you want to rotate a shape or image, you can hold down ⌘ and hold the cursor over a resize point of the shape or image, to change the cursor to a rotation tool.

If you want to make sure that a shape or image keeps the same centre point, hold down ⌥ at the same time as you resize.

Some more graphics keyboard combinations are described in this post.

More resources

In Finder, go to Help, and type "shortcut" in the search field, to get generic Mac OS X shortcuts.

In Pages, go to Help, and type "shortcut" in the searchfield, to get Pages shortcuts.

You can find more information about shortcuts in Mac OS X at Apple's support site.

You can find more information about shortcuts in Pages at Apple's support site.

To learn how to customize your own shortcuts in Mac OS X and Pages, go to this page.