Making sense of Pages 08 vs 09 formats

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Level 1

18 points

Making sense of Pages 08 vs 09 formats

Others are probably way ahead of me on this. What I've observed is that documents saved in Pages '08 are actually folders containing xml and god knows what else ( I believe these are called packages), whereas documents saved in Pages '09 are routinely simple (flat?) files unless you elect '08 compatibility while saving. I'm trying to get ready for Pages in iCloud, and my understanding is that I need to have my docs saved by '09 to participate in iCloud syncing. I tried some applescripting to see if I could distinquish packaged from simple Pages documents, and discovered a "count" method that seemed to work:

tell application "Finder"

if kind of afile is "Pages Publication" and (count of afile) > 1 then

-- the file is "packaged" otherwise the file is flat

I don't care about compatibility with Pages '08 or Word, just iCloud, so I'm barreling ahead with flattening my '08 docs. Am I doing unnecessary work, or painting myself into a corner, or just in over my head?

Posted on Jun 30, 2011 8:49 PM

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Answer 1

Peggy

Level 8

41,601 points

Jun 30, 2011 11:47 PM in response to whsiii

You can choose to save Pages '09 files as either packages or "flat." Actually, the "flat" ones are still packages, it's just that the compression is a bit different so that Finder & e-mail clients don't see the folder. If you change the extension of the file name from .pages to .zip you will be able to unzip the file & see the folder & it's contents.

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Answer 2

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,807 points

Jul 1, 2011 3:39 AM in response to whsiii

(1) The flat files created by iWork '09 when we use the apps with their default settings are in fact packages packed with a special pack tool.

(2) Here are two clean way to make the difference between flatFiles and Packages.

--{code}

set an_item to (path to desktop as text) & "a_poil.pages:"

tell application "System Events"

if package folder of disk item an_item then

-- it's a package

else

-- it's a flatFile

end if

end tell

if package folder of (get info for file an_item) then

-- it's a package

else

-- it's a flatFile

end if

--{code}

(3) what you wrote seems very interesting for me.

As I always set iWork(09 to create packages, I will have nothing to to to prevent them to go on iCloud. 🙂

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 1 juillet 2011 12:38:49

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community

To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

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