Catalina Pages Backwards Compatibility

Document compatibility with prior operating systems is dictated by the Pages version, implemented features in it, and the age of the hardware on which that version of Pages is running.

Each release of Pages contains information about the oldest supported Pages application version on Mac, iOS, and for collaboration. It also indicates which hardware platforms (both Mac, and iOS) that are presently unsupported for opening documents created by the current version of Pages — which will override an older but still compatible version of Pages that is installed on those platforms. With Pages v8.2, the minimum supported application version for document sharing is v5.6 (El Capitan), or Pages for iOS v3.3 (and possibly v2.6). If one has El Capitan running on a early 2009

From the Terminal:

defaults read com.apple.iWork.Pages | awk '/UnsupportedModels/,/\);/ {$1=$1;print}'
defaults read com.apple.iWork.Pages | awk '/UnsupportedDevices/,/\);/ {$1=$1;print}'

You can look up these model identifiers so see what year Mac or iOS device is involved:

https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/



Pages v8.2 (or later) on Catalina cannot export to Pages '08 document format, so you will have to export to either RTF, or Word formats for backwards compatibility. For Pages '09 compatibility, one can export to Pages 09 format. The caveat is that if you are using features unique to the current Pages, those features will not appear in the older document format.

OS X Mavericks was the debut of Pages v5 thru v5.2.2. This implementation only supported package folder (directory) versions of its own document formats. Starting with Pages v5.5.3 on Yosemite, one gained default single-file format documents which were zip-compressed and renamed (.page) documents that were not directly backwards compatible with Pages on Mavericks. Pages v5.5.3 and all subsequent versions have the ability to convert their default documents from the single-file format to the package folder format. This is located on the File menu : Advanced : Change File Type sub-menu.

In Pages v8.2 Help Menu, there is a What's New in Pages item. If you click that, and then select Complete feature list, you can see a history of Pages versions back to v6 and what new features were added at each stage. This is your backwards compatible roadmap as functionality used in Pages v8.2 that was not implemented in Pages v6.0 would not be backwards compatible.