Taking Scrivener for a test ride. I’ve watched the video intro and have played around with the app. Now getting ready to sit down and see if this works for me. But I’m confused.
Am I missing something here, but I’m trying to import Pages documents. However, they all appear grayed out and I’m unable to select for import. Surely Scrivener doesn’t want me to convert each and every one into text, word or PDF. What am I doing wrong?
Scrivener “wants” to let you do that, but Apple doesn’t. 
Search the forum for Pages import issues and you’ll get more detail than you need, probably, on why this is a huge hassle. Apple has refused to document and open up their format to third-party developers, and in doing so have basically built a wall around Pages through which Word is the only, rather expensive, gate (and maybe OpenOffice, but I’ve never tested that). RTF will get you part of the way there, but if either Scrivener or Pages is doing anything more fancy than simple formats, don’t expect much.
Hi, yes, as AmberV says, Apple don’t make the .pages format available to developers outside Apple, so it’s not possible to support it - as much as I would like to.
All the best,
Keith
wow. that’s amazing. especially given the support for import/open and export options for that bloated word processor by the big bad behemoth in Redmond built into pages. same goes for that company behind ‘flash’ when it comes to pdf… seems apple likes to play with others, but doesn’t want to others to play with it…
i had no idea and thank you… I’ll cut and paste!
shame on apple for this…
Even more amazing is the fact that Scrivener’s built in .doc, .docx and .odt exporters (and the bulk of its .rtf exporter, although I’ve greatly customised it) are provided to developers by… Apple. That’s right: they provide built-in Cocoa exporters for Word and OpenOffice, but none for Pages. It’s almost like they want us to be able to better support the competition. I could understand it three or four years go when Pages was in its infancy, but I was expecting a Pages importer/exporter to be introduced with Snow Leopard, maybe. But then, they never made any of the AppleWorks formats easily available to devs either. I’m not sure what their thinking behind this is. If Pages had good RTF support, it wouldn’t be much of a problem. But as it stands, Pages has poor RTF support and good .doc and .docx support. But the .doc/.docx importers/exporters Apple provides to developers are basic and riddled with bugs, while developers can extend the RTF format and their exporters for that format are much better. The end result is that they make Pages the most difficult word processor for Apple developers to support. It drives me mad, as this is quite naturally one of the most frequently asked questions I get - users naturally assume it’s me not supporting Pages rather than the other way around.
Anyway, thanks for your understanding, and thanks for trying Scrivener - much appreciated!
All the best,
Keith
Arrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
Peter, try this experiment: instead of drag or importing from Pages to Scrivener, open up an untitled Scrivener item in the Binder, go to your Pages file, Select All and Copy; then return to the Binder item, click inside, and Paste.
I just tried it with a Pages file, and all the bold, italic, and even hyperlinks survived. I also do it often with TextEdit or Mail files, and the RTF elements do copy/paste. It’s a slower method, but it should work.