Pages?

Scrivener Wish List
1

It would be nice if it were possible to export in Pages. Is this perhaps something in the works?

2

Hi,
This has been raised a few times.

Unfortunately, Apple in their wisdom have kept the Pages format proprietry and not provided an exporter with their text system (like they do for several other formats such as Word).

As Apple won’t release the format, Keith cannot implement an exporter.

[Edit to add: see literatureandlatte.com/forum … port+pages for Keith’s ranting on the subject :slight_smile:]

Matt

3

Thanks Matt for fielding this. I would love to add a Pages export - sadly, Apple make it very difficult for third-party developers to do so. As Matt says, see the post for which he provides a link for my explanation.
Best,
Keith

4

Thanks for the responses. So … I guess for those of us who prefer Pages the thing to do is simply export in Word. Pages can read Word so there is no problem. Is that correct?

Bob

5

Hmm… There are still problems, to be honest. The trouble is that because the Word format is also proprietary, and because the Apple Word exporter included in its text engine strips out footnotes and annotations and images (even though they manage to support all of these things in their own application, Pages, they haven’t added support for such features to their standard exporters that are in use by other developers), Scrivener “cheats” in its Word exporter. DOC files produced by Scrivener are really just RTF files renamed DOC with their creator codes set to Word. This is valid for Word - Word happily takes these files as proper Word documents and other devs have had to take this route too (in fact, I got the idea from Nisus Writer). So, it works fine if you are exporting to open in Word. The trouble, however, is that Pages does not properly support the RTF format. Despite the fact that the RTF format is an old, reliable standard and in common use across various platforms, Apple does not support images, footnotes or comments when reading in or exporting RTF files anywhere. Because the RTF format is an open format - that is, the syntax is well-publicised - I was able to hack in to the Apple RTF importers and exporters to add support for these things in Scrivener. However, this all means that Pages will strip these features if you import an RTF file or DOC file created in Scrivener into Pages.

In fact, the only way to get a file out of Scrivener and into Pages and retain the footnotes, annotations and images is to export as a Word document, open it in Word, and then save it again in Word (or Save As). Then you can open it in Pages fine.

Of course, if you don’t care about footnotes, annotations or images, you can export from Scrivener as RTF or DOC and open the file in Pages fine.

All the best,
Keith

6

Thanks for the education, Keith. A bit depressing but there are worse things in this world. - Bob

7

OK Keith, so why does this work?

Write something with footnotes (I’ve spent most of the week doing this when not dissembling). Use “compile draft” to create an RTFD file. Open in Pages. See footnotes correctly numbered and placed at the end of the document.

Or is this not what you mean?

Pip pip!

8

RTFD export actually “flattens” footnotes, turning them into text only representations of endnotes. They are not actually dynamically referenced. If you add a footnote in between two others, you’ll have to go back and re-number all of them. The RTFD export method is a fail-safe in case you have no way to get your footnotes out otherwise (plain text export does this too).

9

Aha!

Thanks Amber.

Pip pip!