Introduction to iWork Programming Guide

Welcome to the suite of iApps productivity tools called iWork.

Keynote and Pages form the foundation of the iWork suite. Both are designed to provide Apple users with easy to use, yet powerful, feature-rich graphics applications running in Mac OS X. The latest version of Keynote, for example, lets users create high-quality, professional-looking presentations, offering a wide variety of themes, chart and table templates, as well as animated slide transitions. Pages offers users a wide-range of custom templates for easy page layout and design.

Developers can take advantage of Apple’s XML format for Keynote files, known as APXL, to directly create or modify their Keynote presentations. Likewise, developers can create custom templates or modify existing Pages documents by accessing the Pages file format.

Each application is defined by an XML schema. Because both Keynote and Pages use an open, easily accessible file format, developers have a unique opportunity to enhance their existing products or even create new ones, using the iWork XML schemas.

These schemas provide access to the contents of Keynote 2.x and Pages 1.x documents, including themes and slide lists, page layouts, and other organizational structures. Using either of these formats, you can modify the content of your document in ways that supplement the capabilities of either or both applications.

Who Should Read This Document

This document explains, at a basic level, how each XML schema works and offers some examples of common usage. You might find this information valuable if you need to create, modify, or query Keynote or Pages XML documents. If you simply need to parse XML and extract information from an existing source of XML, you may need to look elsewhere for examples that are more suited to your needs.

Both technical notes are no longer applicable for developers who want to work with Keynote 2.x presentations or with Pages 1.x layouts and designs.

This document does not describe the complete XML schema for either Pages 1.x or Keynote 2.x. The complete XML schema for both applications is not available and will not be made public. Nor is this document, by any stretch of the imagination, intended as a comprehensive tutorial on how to customize or extend third-party applications that rely on the schemas of each iWork application. The focus here is on bringing developers up to date on how the schemas work, and what they may need to know in order to take advantage of the robust feature sets available in each application.

To work with this document, you should be familiar with standard XML conventions and be familiar with either one or both iWork applications.

Organization of This Document

This document begins with a high-level discussion of the iWork schemas and is followed by successive chapters that describe the various features of each iWork application, with deconstructed examples of how the XML is formed. Each chapter depends, to a certain extent, on understanding the material presented in any previous chapters.

• “The iWork XML Schemas” describes the document structure of the iWork XML schemas used by Keynote 2.x and Pages 1.x.

• “Deconstructing iWork Shapes and Drawable Objects” discusses the XML used in various iWork shapes, specifically shapes used in Keynote. The basic structure of iWork drawable objects is also defined. All of the shapes in the iWork XML shemas share certain common structures, such as geometry, style, binary, path, image, and so on.

• “Working With Text Objects in Pages Documents” discusses how Pages text objects are stored and laid out in XML.

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