IWA
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
Revision as of 04:00, 16 May 2014 by Dan Tobias (Talk | contribs)
IWA is a format used by Apple as part of the iWork format used in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.
It has a fairly complex structure. It consists of a Protobuf stream compressed using Snappy (both Protobuf and Snappy are formats originating with Google). However, the variant of Snappy that is used does not comply with the spec for that format, omitting the stream identifier and checksum. In the iWork format, these files are found within a ZIP archive (index.zip) that is within the bundle file (actually a directory). The bundle is often found as a ZIP, so the IWA files end up being in a ZIP within a ZIP, with several layers of subdirectories thrown in. So things are nested like Russian dolls.
