Migrating to Writer from Pages: Best Practices Wanted

[DinoNerd]

I have an 80 page document in Apple’s Pages word processor. It uses a lot of features, including tables, table of contents, and lots of images, including images in tables. I’m heartily sick of using Pages, and looking for an alternative.

Unfortunately my first attempts at reading this document with Writer didn’t go well. Writer was willing to read the .pages, but lost the table of contents, the table formatting, any images that were in tables, and my custom headings - maybe a few more things too. It also shortened the document by 21 pages. This doesn’t look like a good way to proceed.

I exported the document from Pages to .epub, but Writer insisted the .epub was corrupt and needed to be corrected.

The next obvious thing to do would be to try every other format Pages can export, starting with word (.docx) But it would be nice to know what (if anything) is likely to work, or whether there’s some approach (eliminating certain features in pages before exporting?) that might get me a non-mangled document.

Also, and relevantly, I’ve had trouble finding a list of what formats Writer can handle. I’ve found 3 inconsistent lists so far, and none of them included .pages. (I tried opening it more or less on a lark.)

Note finally - I’m using Writer from a linux system, not from the Mac, having transferred the files with scp.

[EarnestAl]

I would export as docx in the first instance, it is the format that is most likely to have better export and import filters and it is a word processor format. A second format could be .doc, see which opens best.

It might be worth printing or exporting to PDF too so you have a record of current layout. If it is important and will continue to be worked on then I would consider pasting into a new document as unformatted text, save in native format as .odt and rebuild the formatting, tables and styles.

The Writer Guide and Designing with LibreOffice will help with understanding styles which will help with a smooth workflow. Download from English documentation | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides

[DinoNerd]

Thank you. I’m deep in RTFM-land, and after reading about styles, I think I’ll try importing the text without the formatting.

[iplaw67]

It is pretty much unknown territory, I’m afraid. The Pages import filter is consistently out of date with regard to the latest version of Pages being used by Apple, due mainly to the filter being, like everything else, a volunteer driven project (document liberation), and therefore only updated as and when someone has the itch to scratch and make things better.

I don’t use Pages at all, but I do have a Mac running the latest version of Pages made available by Apple.

My first recommendation would be to check out the LibreOffice Bugzilla, to see which bugs are currently reported against the Pages filter. If you have found new ones during your experiments, please report them and provide a reduced down minimalist Pages test document, so that I, or others can confirm them.

Secondly, in terms of which format is most likely to be successfully imported into Writer from Pages, I would follow the recommendation to use Docx export.