solving Pages 5.6.2 bugs or permanently using 4.3

Question

Level 1

74 points

solving Pages 5.6.2 bugs or permanently using 4.3

i seem to get weird apostraphe's and other miscellanous data on my pages documents and RELY UPON THIS WORK to get work done. for about over a year now there has been an issue on my machines running mavericks and then yosemite where i have to MANUALLY open all my pages documents by selecting 4.3 which seems to show the documents just fine.

i have tried a number of different ways to get my computers to open these documents ALWAYS WITH 4.3 but nothing has seemed to make this happen. so i am constantly having to close out documents and reopen them in 4.3.

then there is some weird additional aggravation where if i want to duplicate a pages document i am prompted to upgrade the 4.3 document for some reason?

at one point i got an extremely detailed response from someone but to be honest my brain locked up when someone else told me there was some other issue with pages documents getting corrupted when stored on dropbox and i just dropped the whole issue because i was too terrified to imagine i have corrupted data in dropbox.

anyway, does anyone know what the current state of play is on solving these rather horrifying workflow issues?

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Aug 15, 2016 11:56 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

VikingOSX

Community+ 2024

Level 10

111,581 points

Aug 15, 2016 12:51 PM in response to hotwheels22

All Pages documents, whether those created by Pages '09 v4.3, or Pages v5.6.2, store the opening application in the document as Applications : Pages.app. You cannot set the opening application in the Finder Get Info panel to always be Pages '09 v4.3, because Pages v5.6.2, which is in Applications will dominate. And by now, you have discovered that Pages v5 documents are not directly backwards compatible with Pages '09.

Several years ago, Dropbox used to list non-Package folder Pages '09 documents as compatible with their site. Now, they list no Apple {Pages, Numbers, Keynote} documents as officially supported documents. Plenty of people store their Apple documents on Dropbox anyway. If the files are lost or damaged, don't expect Dropbox to offer much assistance.

If you upload a Word docx file to Google Drive, it will remain intact. Upload a Pages document, and Google Drive will attempt to unzip/uncompress the document, because the site software has not been programmed to understand that Apple documents are in their final form — like Microsoft documents.

When you attempt to open Pages v5 documents in Pages '09 v4.3 via the File Chooser, you will get the information panel that you need a newer version of Pages. This is just telling you (in a confusing way) — that you attempted to open an incompatible Pages v5 document via the Pages '09 chooser. You need your version of Pages 5 to open it (via a double-click). Closing Pages '09 documents via the document title bar red traffic light does not quit Pages '09. It will continue to run, and ambush double-clicks to open Pages v5 documents. These will tell you that about a missing index.xml file — an internal format unique to Pages documents prior to the release of Pages v5.

Apple has had three years to fix Pages v5 and have not eradicated many of the bugs, or application shortcomings. Pages '09 v4.3 was discontinued three years ago. It should not be considered a permanent solution as Apple is not taking pains to avoid damaging this application beyond usability with forthcoming OS X updates. This is the roulette, and history of Apple word processing solutions.

Reply

Answer 2

Aug 15, 2016 2:44 PM in response to hotwheels22

To open a Pages document in the correct version simply right click on the file in Finder and choose which version you want to open it with. Easy.

Pages 5 is the orange icon. Pages '09 is the dark blue icon.

To open the version of Pages directly keep both versions on your Dock or use:

Menu > Apple > Recent Items

or click on the chosen version on the Dock.

You might want to label files as to their version, I add p5 to the file name. Pages '09 is my default so I don't label those files.

At this point (3 years now) you can safely assume Pages 5 is never going to catch up to Pages '09 and Apple has no intention or plan for that. It is free, basic, default and gets occassional maintenance, but beyond that Apple has lost interest.

I simply use Pages 09 for all my real work, and maintain Pages 5 so I can trouble shoot user's problems and occassionally play with its drawing tools. I am actually waiting for an alternative to both Pages '09 and Pages 5. The current strongest contender is probably Affinity Publisher due early next year. It promises to probably be a very good DTP App rather than a Word Processor/Spreadsheet/DTP App like Pages.

Peter

Reply