Apple Pages is a surprisingly capable writing app.

It is clean, uncluttered, and much more pleasant for general writing than Microsoft Word’s tab-heavy interface. Basic styling, tables, shapes, images, and page layout are all easy to reach. And since the iWork suite became free for all Mac users in 2017, Pages has been sitting there on millions of Macs as a genuinely good writing tool.

For general prep notes, lecture drafts, reports, and long-form writing, I truly enjoy using it. However, the moment citations enter the picture, Pages becomes frustrating.

For academic writing, citations are not optional. You need to insert references, change citation styles, update bibliographies, move paragraphs around, and trust that the document will not slowly become a manual citation mess.

This is where Pages feels strangely locked down. As far as I can tell, Pages has no general citation plugin system comparable to what Zotero uses for Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. There is, however, one exception: EndNote.

For some reason, Apple built a special citation integration path for EndNote years ago (since 2014-ish with Pages '09 ... how time flies), and then seemingly never opened the same kind of workflow to other reference managers.

I do have access to EndNote through my job. But the point is that it feels annoying that the only proper citation path inside Apple Pages is tied to one commercial reference manager, while Zotero users are left with awkward workarounds: copy-paste citations, manual bibliographies, export/import workflows, or just giving up and switching to Word or LibreOffice.

I prefer Zotero. A lot of people prefer Zotero. It is clean, widely used, open-source, and already fits the way many academics manage references.

So I started wondering: What exactly is Pages doing when it talks to EndNote? Per my intuition, it seems to be rather straightforward. Likely just pass a few variables down what I assume is a simple IPC, then just receive things back. The integration's existed for years, versions seem few and far between, and seems rather stable. Seems like something that, after years of coding & poking around at stuff, I should be able to have a look at to scratch this itch of mine.

Zotero-to-Pages. Sounds about right. I have no idea how far this can go. Maybe this turns into nothing. I really don't mind. I just want to know how far I can go with it. With enough tracing & prompting properly the years of reverse-engineering knowledge to coding agents, maybe it is possible to do after all without tiring myself out along the way.

A really, really long lasting itch that I finally get to scratch.