Pages Native

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

Version 0.1.0 is a preview. Native acceptance passed on one Mac running Pages 14.5 and macOS 27.0.1. This does not establish compatibility across other Pages or macOS versions. 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.

Capabilities

28 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 and placeholder fills have preview/apply revision guards. 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 synthetic example shows a native table total of 265 EUR and a separately positioned text item.

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.

Related MCP server: iwork-mcp

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.

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 capabilities, verification, publishing and privacy.