Pages Native

Pages Native

Get started · Native output · Capabilities · Italiano · Verification

Native Apple Pages documents for Codex and MCP. Author: Viames Marino · MIT.

Version 0.5.0. Native acceptance passed 76 checks on one Mac with Pages 14.5 and macOS 27.0.1; 70 portable tests passed separately. Other Pages/macOS configurations remain unverified. See verification.

Pages Native uses Apple's scripting API through fixed JXA and AppleScript workers. Documents remain .pages: no Word conversion, private-format parser, clipboard driver, Accessibility or UI automation.

Requirements and installation

• macOS with an interactive, logged-in session and Apple Pages.
• Node.js 22 or later and Automation permission for the actual host controlling Pages.
• Local execution. This cannot run against the user's Mac from a cloud-only task.

Install the public Codex plugin marketplace and enable Pages Native:

codex plugin marketplace add viames/pages-native

codex plugin add pages-native@viames-pages

Start a new local Codex task and run the setup skill. A compatible MCP host can run node /absolute/path/to/plugins/pages-native/dist/server.mjs; runtime npm installation is unnecessary after build.

Optional PAGES_NATIVE_ALLOWED_ROOTS is a JSON array of existing directories. It guards plugin file paths; it is not a macOS sandbox for the Pages process.

Native output

Synthetic output from the native acceptance test. The report retains the .pages format.

Capabilities

36 MCP tools cover native documents and templates, rich text, existing tagged placeholders, tables with formulas, text/shape/image objects, existing object geometry, explicit native exports, opaque backups and PDF/PNG previews. Existing-text edits, placeholder fills, text/cell formatting, table/cell changes, sorting, merging, dimensions, objects and facing-page changes have preview/apply revision guards. Migration from 0.1: mutation tools now default to preview. Apply the identical request with mode:"apply" and its expected_revision; a successful preview is not a completed edit.

New in 0.5: previewed batches of up to 10 native outputs, immutable recipe history with saved prototype snapshots, structural comparisons, historical reuse and guarded restoration. Batch and history guide.

New in 0.4: typed table fields in composed models and a local reusable recipe library with relative prototype paths, saved-byte fingerprints, version counters and guarded save/delete/use. See typed fields and recipes.

New in 0.3: structured literal search with native text/cell references, and guided composition from saved prototypes with required/default fields and revision-guarded new copies. See search and model recipes.

Mutations may partially apply; there is no automatic rollback. Pages 14.5 exposes placeholder tags for reading but rejects changing them through its scripting API.

The native API does not expose complete paragraph styles, headings/lists, comments, tracked changes, hyperlinks, headers/footers, page setup or chart series/type/title. Features already present in a saved prototype can be preserved through opaque native copies. Creating and editing chart data is not claimed. Font/size/color formatting does not assign named paragraph styles; semantic style preservation during model filling is not yet certified.

Development

npm ci

npm test npm run build npm run test:bundle npm run test:native npm run package

Portable tests validate protocol, bounds, path restrictions, revision planning and timeout recovery. test:native controls Pages on an explicitly designated Mac using isolated synthetic documents; ordinary CI does not certify a graphical Pages installation.

See compatibility reports, capabilities, verification, publishing and privacy.