I just downloaded the trial version - very cool so far. But I seem to be having trouble importing a Pages file to a project. When I dragged and dropped, it told me some formats were not supported.
Am I doing something wrong, is this because I’m using the trial version, or can you not drag and drop a Pages file into a Scrivener project?
Thanks in advance…
Apple Pages uses it own, proprietary format, and Apple has not released the document specifications to developers. So there is no import or export available between Scrivener and Pages—directly. Indirectly is another matter. You’ll need to export your documents from Pages using the RTF or Word format. Since I don’t use Pages, I am not sure which is better. You might want to experiment and see which converts better for you.
Leap from Ironic software seem to be able to preview and display Pages documents’. Which leads me to believe that Apple has finally released the specs.
Alas, I am fairly sure they are just displaying the contents of the QuickLook folder, inside of a Pages document bundle.
FYI, the specs are, sort of, roughly, available via Apple’s site. Note, however, all the caveats about developers not depending on them, how they are not the full specifications and that the full schemas will not be made available and so forth.
This isn’t so much the problem, however. Even if the XML format for Pages was made publicly available, I would have absolutely no intention of writing my own parser, importer and exporter for the format. Absolutely no way. Can you imagine how much work and code would be entailed in reading and writing and converting every bold, italic, paragraph format, bullet point, font etc between the Pages XML scheme and the OS X rich text system? Well, let’s just say that it would be a lot. Apple themselves provide importers and exporters that do all this automatically for all the other text formats - RTF, DOC, RTFD, TXT etc. They even make it relatively easy to convert a web page to rich text. Sure, I hacked in to the RTF importers and exporters to provide more features than the standard Apple importers and exporters (footnotes, images and comments) - but that is not the same thing as writing your own importer or exporter from scratch. Brrr.
So, just to be clear, the only way Scrivener will ever feature a Pages import or export feature is if Apple code and make available an importer and exporter in the same way they have done for all the other major formats. Or, if some other third party do something similar.
You can see that other developers have the same issue:
cocoabuilder.com/archive/mes … /14/189251
And from that, it doesn’t look as though Apple are planning this any time soon. Maybe in the next OS?
Yeah, I’m not chuffed either… 
All the best,
Keith
I love Scrivener on all my Apple devices but especially so on the iPad for mobility convenience. It’s dead simple to import iPad Pages to iPad Scrivener. I open Scrivener and my specific PROJECT in one window and split it with Pages so I see both applications OPEN at the same time. Open your Pages doc and chose the option to Export. I use Word format for formatting purposes. You will be asked to export “to where” including email and many others, depending on what apps you are using. One of the “Options” that will come up is Scrivener. Select Scrivener and it’s done. The document will appear in your document list the project you chose. 8)
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