One of my friends has generously offered to give me copies of his notes, which are in the file format used by Apple Pages. I have a PC, so I can’t read his files on my computer. Are there any free converters out there that I could use on my PC to convert the files to .doc or .pdf format?
Last I looked (a few weeks ago), I couldn’t find a converter yet. None of the usual sites deal with the format, and the only suggestion I could find is have your friend save the files in another format.
Pages can export files as .doc or as .pdf files. Just ask your friend to send them to you in one of those formats.
I don’t know what kind of format Apple pages is, but I’ve had good luck with Zamzar, and they are free for small quantities of data. They seem to be able to convert almost anything, but Mojo’s idea is the best – let the original program do the conversion and it’s more likely to be good.
I teach college history, and my students submit their essays and other written work electronically.
I’m conscious of the fact that students are on a budget, and i don’t believe that my job as a college teacher is to be a de facto Microsoft salesperson, so i make very clear to my students at the beginning of each semester that they may submit their work as Word files (.doc, .docx), Open Office (.odt), Rich Text (.rtf), Portable Document (.pdf), Word Perfect (.wpd), and, if no special formatting is necessary, even Plain Text (.txt) files. I’m on a PC that dual-boots Win7 and Ubuntu, and i can read all of those formats without a hassle.
But i’ve had to forbid them from submitting documents in the Apple .pages format, because it’s just a huge fucking pain in the ass to deal with. The software will, as Mojo the Monkey says, export to more accessible formats, but the people who use the Apple word processor seemed unable to comprehend this fact, even after i explained it to them, so i just banned the format altogether.
Musicat, i tried Zamzar and at least one other online conversion service for .pages, and couldn’t get it to work.
Well, it was worth a shot. Apparently the format is too weird for anyone to get interested in. What the heck is Apple Pages?
My advice to the OP or mhendo’s students is to knuckle down and learn one of the most fundamental functions of computing, the “save as” function, and get used to saving files in a format that most people can read (and edit). My personal fave and the most compatible I have found is RTF, Rich Text Format, even over DOC. If editing is not desired, then PDF. PDF is today’s read-only standard by far; most programs include that as an output option, and if not, there are many free converters online.
And if someone really can’t grasp the “Save As” function, they can just print it. The Mac’s print dialog has a big friendly PDF button that lets you save anything you can print as a PDF file.
I understand the “Save As” function; the issue is that these are class notes from last year, so he has already saved them as .pages. There are lots of files, so converting them would require a substantial time investment. He is doing this for me as a favor. I am looking for any alternative that would not put the burden on him.
Do you know anyone with a Mac, or anywhere (university, etc.) that you can get access to one for an hour or two?
If so, just get the files on a USB key, open them on the Mac and then save them to a format that you can read on your PC.
If you can indeed get access to a Mac for a few hours, you could write an Applescript to automate the Save As process for you.
The Pages file format is a ZIP archive. Use Winzip or 7zip to unzip it. Inside, there’s a Quicklook folder. Inside that is a Preview.pdf. That file is a PDF of the document in question.
Yeah, that’s what i used to do when students would send me Pages files. It’s just a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with over and over again.
Neat, thanks!
F.Pu-du-he-pa-as, if you want to do that for all the .pages files at once, you can install 7zip and run the following command from a command-line window:
7z.exe e "c:\whereever_the_files_are\*.pages" QuickLook\Preview.pdf
Thanks! I installed 7zip and tried that in the command line (substituting the proper everything) and it told me that 77.exe was not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program, or batch file. What am I doing wrong?
It’s 7z, not 77, and you have to make sure you’re executing it from within the 7zip directory.
Try typing:
cd \progra~1\7-zip
before the command I first mentioned.
Eh, I should’ve just made it clearer from the beginning. Starting from scratch (push enter after every command):
- Start -> Run -> cmd
- cd \progra~1\7-zip
- 7z e “c:\whereever_the_files_are*.pages” QuickLook\Preview.pdf
Thanks! The command prompt says that everything extracted just fine, but it put the PDF file in an out-of-the-way location. How would I request that it save the preview.pdf file in a particular folder?
Oops; it seems to put them all in the 7-zip directory, C:\program files\7-zip , since that’s where you ran it from.
Use the following to specify a directory:
7z e "c:\whereever_the_files_are\*.pages" QuickLook\Preview.pdf -o\wherever_the_files_are
Note that there is no space or C: after the “-o”; you immediately follow it with the directory path.