I imported some iWork Pages files containing only text and they are read only from within Scrivener. I can edit them by using the ‘open in external editor’ option but would like to be able to edit them from within Scrivener itself. Is there a simple way to make his happen?
Thanks!
So what is happening here when you drop a .pages file into your Binder, is that Scrivener imports it as a normal non-supported format (it can act as an archive for all types of files, even if it can’t display them natively) and is using the file’s Quick Look preview instead. This is the same thing you’ll see when you invoke Quick Look on a .pages file from Finder (slightly different, but the same mechanism).
So that is very convenient, but not if you want to edit the file in Scrivener, to do so you must export from Pages, using a format that Scrivener can understand. DOCX is the best approach in most cases. Just export from Pages to Word, and then drop the .docx file into your Binder. You can discard it once it has been imported.
And, depending on what you are doing, a simple Copy and Paste of your text from Pages doc to a Scrivener doc may most efficiently serve your needs.
–Greg
Thank you both for your replies. I though about finding a batch converter but decided not to at this time.
I decided that as I go through each document and edit it for final print, via the ‘Open in external editor,’ I will create a new text within Scrivener and just copy and paste it.
Thanks for the informative and helpful responses.
At least give us possibility to copy text. I don’t use Word for 5 years, I don’t understand why Scrivener has better Word support than Pages.
You do not need Word installed to use the .docx format, and both Scrivener and Pages do a good job of reading and writing this file format. The solution already exists.
I’m not sure what you mean about giving you the ability to copy text, though. Are you talking about the Quick Look preview of a .pages file? We have no control over Quick Look, Apple makes that plug-in and they have decided that people shouldn’t be able to select text when they preview a word processing document. It doesn’t make any sense to me either. 
Office on Mac has long been a niche player in the overall Office ecosystem, but a necessary one for larger companies in order to keep the contracts for Office rolling in. Microsoft has every reason to make sure that Word plays well with others so that it stays the dominant word processing package in the majority of businesses. Apple, on the other hand, has no market share to lose[1], so can do what it wants with Pages – and why it wants to do those things is usually not for the reasons that benefit the wider market as a whole. (Not to say they’re not good reasons, but when you don’t have to support a decade plus of critical business documents in your platform, you have more freedom to figure out what your product is for and what it’s going to support.)
I personally have heard of no editors or publishers who accept Pages documents. Every editor and publisher I’ve worked with or heard of accepts Word documents.
[1] Specifically in the office productivity applications market. IIRC, they’re around 90% of the market, with the next two competitors being Google and Open Office-based products. Pages et al are by all accounts very good apps for what they do and being Apple-produced, seem to be well designed, but they are in no way a major player in the office market space by any evaluation I’ve seen yet.
.pages is also a proprietary file format and Apple is not sharing the dope on that file structure. So, other apps can’t really roll their own ways of handling Pages documents directly.
That goes back to my first point – Apple doesn’t have to put interoperability at the top of its design features.