Compatibility With Keynote '09

[scrutinizer11]

Does the parser support Keynote '09 files? Zipping/unzipping a presentation allowed me to extract the index.apxi file but any text editor I'm trying to open it with hangs, even though it's XML (of the huge size of 9 MB). I need to handle the presentation as is, without upgrading it to newer Keynotes.

[psobot]

Apologies - one of my coding agents commented on this issue without my permission. In case it’s useful, here’s its output below until I can actually put time into this:

Thanks for asking, and sorry for the slow reply.

No — keynote-parser can't read Keynote '09 files, and realistically won't.

Keynote '09 uses an entirely different container: an XML-based format (the index.apxi / index.apxl you found), predating the IWA format Apple introduced with Keynote 6 in 2013. Everything in keynote-parser is built around IWA — Snappy-compressed streams of Protobuf archives, with the message schemas extracted from the Keynote binary itself. None of that machinery applies to the older XML format; supporting it would be a separate project rather than a feature here.

For reading it as-is without upgrading, the format is plain (if enormous) XML, so an XML library that streams rather than loads the whole document — lxml.etree.iterparse in Python, for instance — will handle a 9 MB index.apxl comfortably where a text editor won't. Sean Patrick O'Brien's iWorkFileFormat docs cover the older format too and are the best reference I know of.

Closing as out of scope.