Files with a .pages file extension are word processing documents created by Apple's "Pages" application which forms part of Apple's iWork office suite, a set of applications which run on the Max OS X and iOS operating systems, and also includes Numbers (for spreadsheets) and Keynote (for presentations). Pages is a hybrid application, first released by Apple in February 2005, that allows users to perform both word processing and page layout tasks. A direct competitor to Microsoft Word (part of Microsoft's "Office" suite) it originally aimed to take a more simplistic approach to document creation and editing than Word, stripping out many of Word's more complex features.
Pages includes over 140 Apple-supplied templates to allow users to create common documents such as posters, newsletters, certificates, reports, brochures and formal letters - iWork '09 added support for a further 40 new templates. Pages can used to create custom documents which include charts, tables, images, text boxes, shapes, equations and graphs. It incoporates most of the key features found in modern word processors, including the selection of fonts based on WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get"), the use of headers, footers, page-breaks, footnotes, bulleted lists and support for automatically generating a table of contents. Pages also comes with the standard spelling and grammar checkers. Pages provides tools for collaboration through change-tracking and advanced commenting and feedback features.
Pages integrates well with other Apple applications - Since iWork '08 a media browser has been incorporated which allows users to drag and drop photos, movies and music from iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture and iMovie, and it is possible to link charts produced in Numbers to .pages documents so that they update when that data is changed. The version 4.2 release of Pages (in July 2012), added support for the auto-syncing of documents through iCloud, whilst the version 5.0 release (in October 2013) added online collaboration across Macs and iOS devices. The most recent major version is 5.5 released in November 2014, which was part of Apple's iWork '14 release.
The key advances in Pages are summarised below:
Version
Date
Key features
1.0
February 2005
First version - basic features - tables, columns, headers & footers, and some formatting.
2.0
January 2006
Released in iWork '06. Includes 3-D graphing, inline searching, page management, comment support and new table tools.
3.0
August 2007
Released in iWork '08. Introduced a contextual format bar, change tracking, grammar checking (via "Proofreader"), support for Microsoft Office 2007 .docx files (Office Open XML) and image masking features.
4.0
January 2009
Released in iWork '09. New features such as a running word count, full screen editing, equation support (via MathType), support for iWork.com, outline mode, improved support for Microsoft Office documents.
4.1
July 2011
Support added for Mac OS X Lion, full screen document editing, auto saving, resume, document versioning, better compatibility with Microsoft Office.
4.2
July 2012
Support added for Mac OS X Mountain Lion, document syncing via iCloud, retina display support, voice supoprt via Dictation.
4.3
December 2012
iWork iOS 1.7 apps supported.
5.0
October 2013
Allows online collaboration for both Macs and iOS devices, but removed a number of more advanced features.
5.2
April 2014
Improved language support for Arabic and Hebrew, and better AppleScript support.
5.5.1
November 2014
Support for iCloud Drive, improved compatibility with Microsoft Word 2013 and faster performance.
Official file format specifications for iWork Pages files are not published by Apple but there have been attempts by somedevelopers to reverse engineer them.
A .pages file is actually a compressed ZIP file comprised of a number of other different files combined that together make up a .pages file.
The most recent version of Pages saves files with an "Index" directory containing Apple's proprietary IWA file format, a "Metadata" directory with .plist files, a "Data" directory with any image assets (e.g. backgrounds) and one or more jpg files for allowing quick previews.
Similar to Microsoft products, the .pages file type suffers from a lack of compatibility with other leading Word processor programs.
DOCX was introduced with Microsoft Word 2007, it's based on open XML and uses ZIP compression for smaller file sizes. The benefit of having open XML is that it is able to be read by applications, platforms and Internet Platforms. However to open it using any Microsoft Word that predated 2007 would require DOCX to be converted into a normal doc format.
DOCX improves file and data management and data recovery. DOCX extends what is possible with the binary files of earlier versions. Any application that supports XML can access and work with data in the new file format. The application does not need to be a Microsoft product it can be any application. Users can also use standard transformations to extract or repurpose the data. In addition, security concerns are drastically reduced because the information is stored in XML, which is essentially plain text. Thus, the data can pass through corporate firewalls without hindrance.
Associated programs
Microsoft Word 2007 Microsoft Word 2008 (MAC) OxygenOffice Professional (Linux) Word 2010
