Import and Export Your Work

If Pages were the only word processing and layout app in the world and you were the only writer and reader, this book would be done already. However, because other such apps exist, and because you sometimes have to use documents created by other people with those apps or supply them with compatible documents, there’s still a bit more to the story.

In this chapter, I first summarize how to Import Other Document Formats into Pages and then describe how to Export in Other Formats, including how to:

I’ve also included a sidebar, Exporting to iBooks Author, about moving a Pages document into Apple’s iBooks Author software.

Import Other Document Formats

In Open an Existing Document, you saw how the Pages apps can open documents in compatible formats. Let’s look at the formats that the Pages apps can handle:

What about Rich Text?

Surprisingly, Pages 5 currently cannot open files saved in Rich Text format (.rtf). You can easily work around this limitation on the Mac: Microsoft Word, TextEdit, and Pages 4 can all open Rich Text files, so you can use any of those apps as a go-between if you want to open a Rich Text file in Pages 5. For example, you can open a Rich Text file in TextEdit and save it as a Word file, which Pages 5 can open.

Export in Other Formats

As with so many other features, Pages for Mac has the most comprehensive set of document export capabilities. Nonetheless, all the Pages apps provide ways to export documents in these standard formats: Pages (the current version), Word, PDF, and EPUB.

Here’s how you export documents in the Pages apps:

Export in Pages Format

There’s not much to say about exporting in Pages format: both in iOS and in a browser the result is simply a duplicate of the current document. However, with Pages for Mac you have these options:

Export in Word Format

Pages for iOS and Pages for iCloud offer no options when you export a Pages document in Microsoft Word format: the exported file is saved in the .docx format, standard for Word files starting with Microsoft Word 2007. There are a couple of platform specific variations as well:

**Figure 186:** Exporting to Word format on the Mac provides options for requiring a password and setting the specific Word format.

Figure 186: Exporting to Word format on the Mac provides options for requiring a password and setting the specific Word format.

Note: When you export a document that has tracked changes to Word format, the exported document retains the change tracking.

Export PDFs

Pages for iOS and Pages for iCloud provide no additional options you can specify for exported PDFs. If the document has a password, Pages for iOS exports a PDF that requires the same password.

On the Mac, you can assign a password, or change an existing one, when you export a document as a PDF using any of the available methods. You also have the opportunity to specify the quality of images contained in the PDF (Figure 187). The image quality choices are Good, Better, and Best—note, however, that the better the image quality, the larger the resulting PDF file.

**Figure 187:** Sending or exporting a Pages document as a PDF on the Mac provides options for specifying a password and image quality.

Figure 187: Sending or exporting a Pages document as a PDF on the Mac provides options for specifying a password and image quality.

Tip: Choose Best for image quality when exporting a PDF that you intend to have printed; the other two choices are usually more than adequate for PDFs that you intend to view onscreen.

Export Documents as EPUBs

All the Pages apps can export a Pages document in EPUB (or, as Apple in defiance of the EPUB standard’s owners spells it, “ePub”). EPUB documents can be read in apps such as iBooks for Mac and iOS.

Note: Page layout documents cannot be exported as EPUBs; see About Page Layout Documents for more about these documents.

When you export a document as an EPUB, you have several options that you can specify, such as those in the Pages for Mac export dialog (Figure 188). The other Pages apps have similar dialogs, though they may label or organize their options somewhat differently. Most of these options affect the metadata stored in the exported EPUB.

**Figure 188:** The EPUB export options, such as the ones for the Mac shown here, set the EPUB’s metadata, which EPUB reading apps use to present and organize their book collections.

Figure 188: The EPUB export options, such as the ones for the Mac shown here, set the EPUB’s metadata, which EPUB reading apps use to present and organize their book collections.

Note: Metadata is data about data. EPUBs contain a lot of metadata that describe their various features and characteristics. EPUB reading apps, such as iBooks, can employ that metadata to organize and display their ebook collections.

Here’s what the options are for:

Note: If you have created a Table of Contents in your Pages document, the EPUB will include it, though it may not show the same hierarchical nesting levels as the Table of Contents in the Pages source document, depending on the EPUB reader.

A few other notes about EPUBs exported from Pages:

Exporting to iBooks Author

Documents you export in EPUB format can be imported into Apple’s iBooks Author app, which is used to produce interactive ebooks. You can use this capability to perform most of a book’s composition and editing in Pages, and then export it in EPUB format and bring it into iBooks Author for the final production work. Take Control of iBooks Author covers this app.