I love a good puzzle! A friend’s aunt sent her a .pages file from a Mac and she needed a way to open it and print it on her PC.

It turns out that a .pages file is really a RAR archive (like a zip folder) and you can open it up using WinRAR (or a similar RAR de-archiving program) and take a look around inside.

There are two useful files in the archive. In the Quicklook folder, there’s a formatted PDF of the document you can use to make a printout, or you can cut & paste all the text into word or whatever you’re using to edit.

In the root folder, there’s an XML file with the text contents of the document. The formatting in this XML file is pretty weird, but if you’re really desperate, all of the text is in here. Look down near the bottom of the document, for the <sf:pagestart> tag.

I’m not sure that the Quicklook PDF includes multiple pages, since the mysterious file I was working with was only one page. If it turns out there’s no way to fish out the information you’re looking for, consider asking the .pages creator to re-export the document to word format, following the steps in this video:

http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/#pages-msoffice