@mdgate/pages

Convert Apple Pages documents to Markdown in TypeScript.

@mdgate/pages reads .pages files directly in JavaScript and converts them into GitHub-Flavored Markdown, without Python, native addons, WASM, or Pages.

Works in Node.js, Cloudflare Workers, Edge runtimes, and browsers.

npm install @mdgate/pages

import { toMarkdown } from '@mdgate/pages';

const markdown = await toMarkdown(bytes);

bytes is a Uint8Array, so the document can come from a file upload, object storage, iCloud export, a browser file picker, or anywhere else your application gets bytes.

Why @mdgate/pages

Pages files are iWork packages, not Word files with a different extension. A DOCX parser will not read them.

@mdgate/pages is a Pages reader written for the same runtime as your application:

• Pure TypeScript
• Pages → Markdown locally
• No Python runtime
• No native addons
• No WASM runtime
• Zero third-party runtime dependencies
• Works with raw Uint8Array input
• Detects Pages packages from their contents, not only the filename

What it extracts

@mdgate/pages opens the iWork archive, reads IWA protobuf storage (and older pre-IWA documents when needed), and rebuilds a shared document model.

The converter handles Pages-specific concerns including:

• headings and paragraphs
• emphasis
• lists
• tables
• text storage order inside the iWork package

The output is Markdown that can be searched, indexed, chunked, cached, or passed directly to an AI agent.

Node.js

import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
import { toMarkdown } from '@mdgate/pages';

const bytes = new Uint8Array(await readFile('essay.pages'));
const markdown = await toMarkdown(bytes);

console.log(markdown);

Browser

import { toMarkdown } from '@mdgate/pages';

const file = input.files![0];
const bytes = new Uint8Array(await file.arrayBuffer());

const markdown = await toMarkdown(bytes);

Cloudflare Workers and Edge runtimes

import { toMarkdown } from '@mdgate/pages';

export default {
  async fetch(request: Request) {
    const bytes = new Uint8Array(await request.arrayBuffer());
    const markdown = await toMarkdown(bytes);

    return new Response(markdown, {
      headers: {
        'content-type': 'text/markdown; charset=utf-8',
      },
    });
  },
};

Format detection

You do not need to trust the file extension.

@mdgate/pages recognizes Pages iWork packages from ZIP / Index.zip contents.

const markdown = await toMarkdown(bytes);

A path can still be supplied as a format hint when @mdgate/pages is used through @mdgate/converters or a reader composed with @mdgate/core, but the path is never used to read a file from disk.

Compose it with other file readers

@mdgate/pages implements the converter interface from @mdgate/core.

import { create } from '@mdgate/core';
import { pages } from '@mdgate/pages';
import { docx } from '@mdgate/docx';
import { pdf } from '@mdgate/pdf';

const read = create([
  pages(),
  docx(),
  pdf(),
]);

The application still uses one reading interface while each format remains independently installable.

Need more than Pages?

If your application needs to read many different file types, use the complete converter set:

npm install @mdgate/converters

import { toMarkdown } from '@mdgate/converters';

const markdown = await toMarkdown(bytes, {
  path: filename,
});

@mdgate/pages is one of the single-format packages in the open-source mdgate/converters project.

For AI agents, the same converter architecture can be used to extend read_file from text files to real-world document formats.

License

MIT