Chris Puttick <> wrote on 08/19/2009
11:25:46 AM:
>
> Hi all
>
> One of our users has managed (in an undocumented process ;) ) to
> corrupt an important document. While unzip of various guises works
> i.e. we can acquire content.xml and other elements, much of the
> importance of the document was related to its layout which is harder
> to acquire. Are there any tools that can be used to fix the file or
> identify the issues causing the problem?
>
> Notes: created in OpenOffice 3.x (probably .1) and worked on in 3.1
> (and nothing else as far as is known). OpenOffice reports "Error
> reading file" with no additional information. KOffice reports "The
> file <filename>.odt is a binary, saving it will result in a corrupt
> file." Googledocs struggles on for about 10 minutes then reports "We
> encountered an error converting your file. Sorry, that file is
> corrupt, or an unknown format."
>
> All suggestions welcome...
>
Hi Chris,
If this happened to me, I'd do this:
1) First make a back up of the document. However bad it is now, you can
certainly make it worse. So back up.
2) Run the document through an online validator, or perhaps do a local
validation if the document is too sensitive to a validator:
http://wiki.oasis-open.org/office/How_to_Validate_an_ODF_document
3) You can then try to hand-edit the XML to make it valid. This requires
quite a bit of ODF knowledge, so I would not recommend this to the average
word processor user. But I know you are far from average, so you might
give it a try.
Also, if the document is not too sensitive, I'd be interested in looking
at it in the corrupted form.
-Rob
