Re: Pages document
Re: Pages document
- Subject: Re: Pages document
- From: Scott Thompson <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 07:23:39 -0500
On Sep 13, 2007, at 7:21 PM, John Stiles wrote:
*cue laugh track*
No, in all seriousness, I think he has a good point. We can load up
RTF files into our NSTextViews with only a few lines of code. I
don't think it's too much to ask that Pages documents be supported
with a similar API. (To the best of my knowledge, the answer is "no,
there is no API for this in Tiger.")
There's a question here. Do you want to render the entire Pages
document, or just some preview of it?
There's no API to render an ENTIRE pages document in Tiger, and I
don't know that it would be a good idea to have a dedicated API to do
it in any future version.
The issue, in my opinion, is that PDF, RTF, HTML, (DOC being an
exception, but also enjoying only limited support) are all standards
based document formats. Pages, in contrast, is a "proprietary"
document format. Pages has a complex layout process and that entire
layout process would have to be incorporated into the renderer (you'd
probably end up with something roughly on the size of Pages itself).
Moreover, it would be harder for Apple to change the format of pages
documents and still maintain backward compatibility in the renderer.
To put it another way, standards based formats are easier to support
because their specifications are slow and lumbering.
Now, if you want a preview, you might be able to dig around in a Pages
document and find some kind of document preview (probably a reduced
quality PDF?) that you could display. I imagine that's what Apple's
QuickLook plugin will do.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/quicklook.html
:-)
Scott
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