Opening iWork Pages documents in Textedit

Question

I have a Pages (iWork '08) document I'd like to work on on my laptop, but my laptop doesn't have iWork. When I try to open the document, it turns out to actually be a folder with several things inside, but everything seems to be meta information. Is there a specific file in there I can open in Textedit and work on, and if so, which one?

Answer 1

iWork '08 saves it's files as bundles which will appear as a folder with files within it. iWork '09 unless you turn on "Save files as packages" in the preferences saves it as a flat file now.

The index.xml.gz file is a gzip'd version of the text and formatting rules (in xml) of the file). It's possible to unzip this file, make an edit and then rezip it back up but I would advise against it as the work unzipping, rezipping and handling the xml is not really worth the hassle.

Without access to iWork there isn't much you can do - you could export from Pages as an .rtf as TextEdit will be able to edit and work with those as well as Microsoft Word documents.

Answer 2

as you already have noticed, the iWorks file is a archive file containing multiple other files, your images etc. the text part of this file uses XML for formatting.

more details can be read here: http://ctrambler.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/iworks-xml-format-vs-odf-vs-ooxml-preliminary-thoughts/

as a concequence, you're unable to open it Textedit, however, there are two different ways you can go from here

• You might want to try opening it with OpenOffice.org Writer, which should support an iwork-pages document.

• If your document only contains test without any type of markup, you might want to save it as a plain text document instead of an iwork pages document note that this will remove all formatting from your file thisĺl allow you to open the text document with Textedit

Answer 3

This works at least with iWork09's pages documents. Replace .pages with .zip and unzip the file. In the unzipped folder you will find quicklook-folder containing common pdf-file.