How can I convert Mac Pages for Affinity Designer

[Ryan Clarke]

I have spent the past few years working on a document in Mac Pages that is 100,000 words long and needs to be prepared for publication. Only now do I discover that Affinity 1.10.6 will not import Mac Pages documents.

I exported out of Pages as a docx but it is a terrible mess on import to Affinity. The mess that Mac Pages makes of it's awful export fearure is compounded by the mess that Affinity adds during import.

Thankfully, exporting out of Mac Pages as a rich text file preserves all of my formatting inside Affinity. But none of my styles. So I have to build the styles again. This wouldn't be so much of a problem but I have footnotes as well that should appear under each page. The Affinity import keeps all of the footnotes but combines them together on a separate last page.

So is there any way of importing Mac Pages documents into Affinity, even if I have to use a different convertor, so it preserves my styles?

And more importantly, is there any way of preserving my footnotes so they are added at the bottom of each page?

[MikeTO]

Hi @Ryan Clarke

Export from Pages to Word format (docx). That will preserve your footnotes and your paragraph and character text styles. The Word document will import correctly into Publisher.

Cheers

[Ryan Clarke]

As I said in my original posting exporting from Pages to Word (docx) does not work. It makes a mess of the format and does not even acknowledge the footnotes.

I've even tried using Libre Office, but no dice. Once again Affinity seems to think there is only one word processor and that is Word. If I had known that Affinity Publisher only works with Microsoft word and no other word processor I would never have purchased it. There simply is no way of importing Mac Pages into Affinity Publisher and that seems to be a massive oversight.

[MikeTO]

16 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

As I said in my original posting exporting from Pages to Word (docx) does not work. It makes a mess of the format and does not even acknowledge the footnotes.

I did try creating a document in Pages with multiple text styles and footnotes. I exported it to Word (docx) and then imported that to Publisher. It imported as I expected without issues. There are some known issues with the formatting of Word footnotes but those are easy to clean up once you get the text into Publisher.

Can you confirm that you're using Publisher 2.2? If not, which version of Publisher are you using? Also you mentioned Designer in the title of your post, you did mean Publisher, right?

If your styles aren't importing correctly could you please share a test file? You don't need to share the content of your Pages file, just duplicate the file, delete all of its text and images, type a couple of lines in each of the key text styles, and then save the file under another name.

20 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Once again Affinity seems to think there is only one word processor and that is Word. If I had known that Affinity Publisher only works with Microsoft word and no other word processor I would never have purchased it. There simply is no way of importing Mac Pages into Affinity Publisher and that seems to be a massive oversight.

For better or worse, docx and rtf are the industry standards. Adobe Indesign can only import these formats, too. While I think Pages is a pretty neat program, there aren't that many people who want to convert from Pages to Affinity, and since Page has a good Word export feature, it's not an issue.

Good luck.

[Old Bruce]

Your topic title says "Designer" and your second post mentions Publisher.

I am going to assume you are actually using Publisher, I am further going to assume you are using Publisher 2 because that is the most current version. Publisher version 1 does not support Footnotes. 

Are you exporting as DOCX or DOC? It has to be DOCX.

Are you using File > Place... or are you copying and pasting?

All I can say is that in my experience Pages (version 13.1) here on my Mac exports as DOCX and that DOCX file will "import" into a Publisher 2 file with the footnotes.

Regarding 

45 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

The Affinity import keeps all of the footnotes but combines them together on a separate last page.

I would use the Text > Notes > Convert Notes... dialog.

[MikeTO]

@Old Bruce Pages can't export to doc, just docx.

[Ryan Clarke]

Yes, sorry I did mean Publisher in my original post title. Sorry, not sure how to edit it. I did specify v1.10.6 and not 2. I have tried to use 2 on my wife's laptop and it keeps crashing so not really keen to upgrade if it won't fix the problem. I am also using Pages 13 and I am saving docx. Pages will not allow you to save under any other format for Word except docx. I am also using the PLACE function to enter the document.

When I open it in Affinity every single paragraph has a small dot next to it and it cannot even preserve a simple bold font in the text styles. This is what Iam seeing every time:

 

I have tried loading the same document into Affinity 2 on my wife's laptop. Exact same dots all over the place. Most styles are not properly preserved. I don't understand why I'm getting these weird formatting issues on two different laptops with two different versions of Affinity. I have tried repeatedly saving different documents in Pages to docx. Get the same issues every time.

Edited October 18, 2023 by Ryan Clarke

[loukash]

34 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

I don't understand why I'm getting these weird formatting issues on two different laptops with two different versions of Affinity.

To understand this, you may want to upload an excerpt of your Pages document here for us to inspect. Could be that at this size, your Pages document already has some kind of an internal corruption.

[MikeTO]

50 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Yes, sorry I did mean Publisher in my original post title. Sorry, not sure how to edit it. I did specify v1.10.6 and not 2. I have tried to use 2 on my wife's laptop and it keeps crashing so not really keen to upgrade if it won't fix the problem. I am also using Pages 13 and I am saving docx. Pages will not allow you to save under any other format for Word except docx.

If you're using 1.10.6 the footnotes won't import as that version of Publisher doesn't support footnotes. You'd have to upgrade to Affinity 2.

Is your wife using Affinity 2 on macOS? If so, check her Affinity Publisher 2 > Settings > Performance options. If Hardware Acceleration is selected, disable it. If Display is set to Metal, change it to OpenGL. That should solve the crash issues.

52 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

When I open it in Affinity every single paragraph has a small dot next to it and it cannot even preserve a simple bold font in the text styles. This is what I am seeing every time:

That looks like all of your paragraphs are being imported as bulleted. We'd need to see a test document to figure it out but check the style definition in Pages to ensure that style is set to No Bullets. This is an easy problem to fix but it might also be your Publisher template. Just edit the text style and set bullets to none.

[Old Bruce]

@Ryan Clarke,

As loukash and MikeTO said we would need to see a small Pages document that has still demonstrates this problem. Just a few pages with footnotes would do.

[Ryan Clarke]

Thanks for all your help.

After much investigation I found that the problem was the title page on each chapter. No idea why. Once it was deleted the text exported and imported okay.

I have no idea why the chapter heading style affected the whole document in that way and caused it to add special characters that came out as dots. They weren't bullet points as the imported styles showed no bullet points. The same dots even showed up in when cut and pasted into a rich text file but weren't bullet points.

The curse of using new software. Weird stuff happens on the first few days that never seems to happen again.

So now I can start to tackle the footnotes problem, so thanks for all your input on that.

[MikeTO]

I'm glad you figured it out.

There's always a reason why something happens so if you want it figured out to avoid the issue again, just upload a tiny sample with the chapter heading style that causes the problem and we can take a peek at it.

Cheers