Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Productivity, Apple, Microsoft
iWork files are really just zip files, and contain PDF previews
by Jason Clarke Nov 1st 2009 at 10:00PM
Have you ever received an iWork file created in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote on a Mac, and not had any way to deal with it? Next time, try changing the file's extension to .zip, then unzip it with your favorite zip utility. Inside you should find a PDF preview document containing a nicely formatted version of the document in question.
It seems strange that Apple doesn't promote this fact more, as it's a real usability win for iWork users that want to share their documents with non-Mac users. Wouldn't it be nice if Word, Excel, and Powerpoint did this?
[photo by *keng]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Johnny K said 10:30PM on 11-01-2009
"Wouldn't it be nice if Word, Excel, and Powerpoint did this?"
Uhm... They do; .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc. are all ZIP files containing an XML hierarchy, called Office Open XML. You can go in and change every aspect of the document _as plaintext_ just by opening it as a zip file. Plus, no file bloat with an unnecessary PDF file.
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David said 11:06PM on 11-01-2009
Precisely, and Office Open XML is a completely documented and published standard so that anyone can edit and parse Office Open XML files with confidence as to how it will be parsed. These zip files are also built so that the XML is the first file compressed, so that corrupted Office 2007 files have a better chance of recovering the content of the document and only having included media, compressed at the end of the zip file, being corrupted.
ben said 12:01AM on 11-02-2009
But the Office Open XML ISO standard is incredibly complicated. So complicated, in face, that Office 2007 does not properly conform to its own standard.
Johnny K said 12:17AM on 11-02-2009
@Ben: Now you're just getting technical. It doesn't change the fact that the Open Office XML standard negates the need for an entire separate PDF file to be stored along with the document, keeping file size down.
snowy2004 said 10:38PM on 11-01-2009
They might not want to promote this to give a purpose to their web service, iwork.com, made to share iWork docs.
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Mike said 11:17PM on 11-01-2009
I just checked a keynote file someone sent me a while back and there's no .pdf preview in it. There's one small .jpg preview of the first slide, and a bunch of very small thumbnails that are completely illegible. Renaming it as a .zip does work, though.
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KarlW said 12:31AM on 11-02-2009
People should just use PDFs straight. Seriously, since I bought a Mac, my hatred for anything PDF has just gone. On Windows, you have to open up Acrobat reader (which is a pig). On a Mac, it opens up in Preview just like a JPEG, or in Safari in a seamless built-in reader. Microsoft need to add support to windows' picture viewer - it's just so useful!
PDFs are quick to open, and represent things exactly as they would appear on paper. They're also vector-based for easy scaling whilst preserving formatting, and can be opened easily on any platform. Also, unlike OOXML, you don't get formatting errors on other platforms (nobody formats things like Word, reading from the same spec sheet).
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Dafrety said 12:51AM on 11-02-2009
You could also have just used Foxit or PDF-Exchange, both lightweight freeware that do the same job as Adobe's reader. I do agree that it would be nice for Microsoft to add support though.