After updating to Mavericks, Pages is crashing whenever I save

I am having the same issue in Pages on my iPad. My once indispensable writing tool has become unusable. It freezes when I open documents. If I do manage to finally get one to open, it freezes when I try to write. A number of my documents have become completely inaccessible and visually on the screen look corrupted. Very frustrating. Three separate hours at the genius bar with three different staff yielded no solutions, other than they informed me the new software Pages "update" is a "beta" version. So for heaven's sake warn people whose livelihood depends on their writing NOT to "upgrade" to Maverick and the new Pages app. From what I was told, Pages has had many of it's features removed to make it compatible across iPhone platforms.

Apple has requested my crash logs, so hopefully they are working on this.

I think I found a fix to this. I discovered it because the documents do save updates, but the document previews don't appear to update - thus leading me to believe it's a problem with that phase of the saving process. By testing this locally, it seems to work on every file, but your experience may vary. Long story short, when you open the document:

• On new documents - be sure to uncheck the "Include preview in document" option when saving for the first time.
• On existing documents, the easiest work-around I could find is just to save a new copy of the document. Just go to File > Save As..., and again, make sure to uncheck the "Include preview in document" option before you save. Other than that, I couldn't find a way through the application to disable it from saving a preview of the document. Maybe it's somewhere obvious, and I just overlooked it... which is entirely possible/probable.

In either case, you may want to uncheck the "Include preview in document by default" option in the Preferences, so you don't have to remember for future files.

I hope this helps.

For the extra nerdy:

Since I couldn't find a way to disable the preview within the user interface of Pages, I dug into the package contents of the saved files. If you choose to go this route, there is a value in the un-gzipped "index.xml" file called "sl:SLSaveQuickLookPreviewProperty". The value is probably set to 1, but should be changed to 0 to make it stop creating previews/pdfs. You'll need to re-gzip that file to take the place of the "index.xml.gz" file in the package contents. You should be good to go. You might want to delete the existing pdf while in there, since they'll be useless/out-of-date going forward. If all of that sounds foreign to you, just pretend I didn't write this paragraph. Even if you did understand it, it's probably easier to just save a new copy. I'm sure somebody with more skills/interest than I could make a quick file patcher that makes this change in whatever file you drop on it.

I must sadly reveal my complete non-techiness. I downloaded the iWork '09 Trial from the link that was posted. However, a message tells me "iWork09Trial.mpkg" can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer." "iWork09Trial.mpkg" is on the disk image "iWork09Trial.dmg". Safari downloaded this disk image on November 1, 2013 from iwork.en.softonic.com.

Me confused.

The latest. Now none of my documents will open in Pages. The error message I get is "This document can't be opened because it's too old. To open it, save it with Pages '09 first". As I stated just above, I can't install the '09 Trial, therefore I can't save documents with Pages '09 first. Sigh.

My platform is a MacAir running OS X Version 10.9. I have no disk drive therefore I assume I cannot install the iWork '09 Trial download as the error I wrote about above is yelling at me. Correct? Or am I so very very non-techie that I am not understanding what to do?

Yes it's pretty funny... Apple wants to protect itself from 'bad developers'. fair enough.

Dam! those iWorks developers are pretty crap and unidentified.

1. In Finder, control click or right click the icon of the app.

2. Select Open from the top of contextual menu that appears.

3. Click Open in the dialog box. If prompted, enter an administrator name and password.

Peter

NB Many features have been removed from Pages 5 see:

iWorkTipsnTricks Forum

Meanwhile it probably is best to continue using Pages '09 if that is possible and if you are unhappy with Pages 5 give it a review and rating in the App Store.

Hi,

Thanks for the workaround.

If my pages document has the preview unchecked, there is no problem to open and save it.

I'll uncheck all my current pages documents.

Stef

Thanks for the link to the update! I had a problem with invisible and/or purple text in iWork '08. 3.03 update fixed it. Needs the manual link to update since Software Update only goes to the App Store.

the workaround to not generate previews is working for me now (i just have to be _really_ careful when working with a combination of old and new files).

also, i sampled the Pages process when it was hung up after doing a save with preview included. if anyone wants to pore through that to see if there's a better solution, here's the dump: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ke9sebilf95j82b/crashed%20pages%2008%20sample.txt

update: i also have an AppleScript that automatically saves a copy of Pages documents as PDFs. even on files where i've disabled preview generation, this hangs the app. the relevant line of the script is:

save front document as "SLDocumentTypePDF" in docPathAndName

PDF export and Print to PDF both work fine. i'm guessing that Mavericks nixed or moved some PDF generation library that Pages uses. (i know that the script above and quick look preview PDFs are *compressed*, so maybe it's a PDF compression library? ColorSync something something?) and maybe, just maybe, if we can figure out what the missing dependency is we can restore it from a Mountain Lion /Library/ folder and get this fixed in Mavericks.

The only work around that I found is to drag the document to your desktop. Open it, edit as you choose. You can save it to pages again and Icloud, but for some reason you can't open the document from Icloud in Maverick. I'd like to see a fix as well.

Get over it.

Apple abandoned ship and are not coming back. Just spend the $20 and get the new iBS version or start using Google docs (as painful as it is). No one is going to fix the old pages.

This worked for me. Thanks longbored!

Thanks! That helped!