Recovering Pages 09 Document - Won't Open

If your document is complicated you may not get the best results and as the document is corrupt it may not even work at all, although the Quicklook preview working is a good sign.

Find the pages document on your computer. Cmd+I and change the extension from .pages to .zip

Then open the .zip file by double clicking on it. A window shoudl appear with the following files/folders in it




In the Index.xml file is the text however it is very difficult to extract all the text from it as it is hidden amognst all the formatting.

However if you go into QuickLook. You should see two files

Preview.pdf
Thumbnail.jpg


If you open the Preview.pdf in Preview you can then copy the text and paste it back into a text document.

You will likely lose formatting etc but at least you can save the words.



As to why Pages doesn't have autosave who knows, send feedback to apple
http://www.apple.com/feedback/pages.html

 

Recovering Pages - and opening from other versions

YES!!! THANK YOU!! This saved me a pile of trouble, as it works to retrieve the text from a Pages 09 document that won't open in Pages 08.