on Bypassing Apple Pages
I have Pages loaded on my laptop, but not on my desktop, and I rarely pull out my laptop these days. Every once in a while I get documents sent to me in Apple’s Pages format, though, and it really irks me that it’s such a proprietary format that other programs (including Apple’s own TextEdit) can’t open a version of the document.
I still haven’t found a way to copy text out of the document, but I have found a couple of ways to read Pages documents. You can see a preview of the document when you click on the Quick Look icon in the Finder window (the little eyeball icon), but it disappears if you go to any other program. But I often want to type up sections that I read from the document.
For a while, what I would do to quickly work around this is right-click on the document (yes, I use a mighty mouse, I do have a right-click), and click “Show Package Contents”. There’s a jpeg thumbnail in the QuickLook folder that is barely readable, but readable no less. You can open this in Preview or Photoshop and transcribe content from there.
Tonight, though, I found an even better way. The Quick Look that shows up in Finder is a lot better quality than the jpeg thumbnail. To capture this, I clicked on Quick Look to pull up the document. Then, I did a screen capture of the Quick Look using Leopard’s built in Command-Shift-4 screen capture.
Still not as good as having text to copy and paste, but it’ll do for now….
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