Pages '09 opens Pages '08 files without difficulties and can save into that format (see the new
Share menu), but the new format cannot be opened in Pages '08.A Pages '08 was basically a folder with a .pages extention. You could go to Terminal and do a:
$ cd file_name.app
to find the following list of files:
$ ls
Contents QuickLook index.xml.gz
where both
Contents and Quicklook were folders with files in them, while the file itself was a gz-compressed XML file (index.xml.gz)Now, the same file created by Pages '09 would have a totally different structure.
Where file_name.pages was a folder containing compressed data in Pages '08, the file is a compressed folder containing normal files.
To see what it looks like, change the
.pages extension to .gz and double-click that file. The result is a folder with the following files:
$ ls
QuickLook buildVersionHistory.plist index.xml
Quicklook is still a folder with a PDF (Quicklook) and a JPEG (thumbnail) preview of the file but the old Contents folder is not there and the index.xml contains XML code that significantly differs from the one in Pages 08.Keynote '09 and Numbers '09 show a similar internal structure for their files.