pages

Apple Pages documents, rendered in your terminal. View them, page through them, and git diff them, without opening Pages. Works on macOS and Linux.

Install

brew install crsves/tap/pages      # Homebrew (macOS, Linux)
cargo binstall pages-cli           # prebuilt binary via cargo-binstall
cargo install pages-cli            # build from source

On Debian and Ubuntu, download the .deb from the releases page and run sudo apt install ./pages_*.deb. The same page has tarballs for macOS and Linux (x86_64 and arm64). An AUR package is ready in packaging/aur and will be published once AUR account registration reopens.

Usage

pages essay.pages          # print to stdout
pages -p essay.pages       # open in a pager ($PAGER, default `less -R`)
pages -w 72 essay.pages    # wrap at 72 columns
pages --color never a.pages b.pages

pages reads the file directly, so Pages.app doesn't need to be installed. It decodes the IWA format (Snappy-compressed protobuf) with a small hand-written reader.

Integrations

git diff for Pages documents

Git treats .pages files as binary. Point it at pages and diffs become readable text:

echo '*.pages diff=pages' >> .gitattributes
git config diff.pages.textconv "pages --color never"

   Why it matters
-  Documents outlive the apps that made them.
+  Documents outlive every app that made them.

Use git config --global and ~/.config/git/attributes to turn it on everywhere.

fzf

fzf --preview 'pages --color always -w $FZF_PREVIEW_COLUMNS {}'

yazi

With the piper plugin, in ~/.config/yazi/yazi.toml:

[[plugin.prepend_previewers]]
url = "*.pages"
run = 'piper -- pages --color always -w "$w" "$1"'

ranger

In ~/.config/ranger/scope.sh, inside handle_extension:

        pages)
            pages --color always -w "${PV_WIDTH}" -- "${FILE_PATH}" && exit 4
            exit 1;;

What renders

• Title, subtitle, and headings (from the paragraph style; also big, short, bold body paragraphs formatted by hand)
• Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and super/subscript
• Bulleted, numbered (decimal, roman, alpha, tiered), and nested lists
• Tables with box drawing; header rows are highlighted, and wide tables shrink to fit
• Hyperlinks: clickable OSC 8 links on stdout, URL shown after the link text in the pager or with --color never
• Block quotes and text boxes
• Placeholders for images, charts, and video

Colour is on when stdout is a TTY and NO_COLOR is unset.

Limits

• Cell number formats (currency, percent, and so on) aren't applied. Numbers show their raw value, and text cells show what was typed.
• Merged table cells show as separate cells.
• Headers and footers, comments, and tracked changes are skipped.
• Pages '09 (XML) files aren't supported, and neither are tables saved by Pages versions before 2019 (they show a placeholder).
• Footnotes are decoded but haven't been checked against real documents yet.
• iCloud files that haven't been downloaded can't be read. Open them in Finder first.

If a document renders wrong, please open an issue. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to share a problem document safely.

Build

cargo install --path .
cargo test
PAGES_FUZZ_ITERS=20000 cargo test --release --test robustness   # longer corruption run

Requires Rust 1.85+. Packagers can generate a man page and completions with pages --generate-man and pages --generate-completions <bash|zsh|fish|elvish|powershell>.

tests/fixtures/*.pages were made by building a .docx with mkdocx*.py (python-docx), then opening it in Pages, saving it as a .pages file, and keeping only the Index/*.iwa archives (no previews, images, or document metadata).