Easily reading a .pages file on a Mac without iWork (or under Windows or Linux, etc.)

Aside from a Windows laptop my employer forces me to use our family is 100% Macintosh (both PowerPC and Intel). I received a .pages file today from a neighbor. I needed to access the information in the document but the trial copy of Apple's iWorks had expired.

When people email me Microsoft Word .doc files Gmail quite conveniently provides a link to view the document as HTML. No such luck for a .pages file.

Personally, I wish people would just use open file formats, rather than proprietary ones. If I need a text editor I usually use vi . If I need to typeset something I'll use either LaTeX or ConTeXt . But I didn't want to ask the sender to convert it to another format; I was just grateful she sent the information I needed in a timely fashion.

I briefly did some Google searching; when I didn't see anything that seemed remotely relevant on the first page of search results I suddenly had a hunch: perhaps a .pages file is a .zip archive?

Bingo!

michael$ unzip -l June\ 09.pages Archive: June 09.pages Length Date Time Name -------- ---- ---- ---- 70187 07-19-09 11:10 QuickLook/Thumbnail.jpg 20084 07-19-09 11:10 QuickLook/Preview.pdf 335 07-19-09 11:10 buildVersionHistory.plist 361897 07-19-09 11:10 index.xml -------- ------- 452503 4 files

No need for iWork; I just unzipped the QuickLook/Preview.pdf and I could easily open that. The .xml file, especially when pretty-printed with extra whitespace and appropriate layers of indenting, was also quite humanly readable.

So, if you need to read a .pages file under Linux, Unix, Windows or on a Mac without iWork, just run: unzip -j document.pages QuickLook/Preview.pdf

—Michael A. Cleverly

