The validators should give you a hint, I guess. To me it sounds as being
some obscure tag problem. How did this start? Suddenly, while opening?
Corrupted (crashed) save before? Backups available? Some weird graphics
included?
Jan
(Sent from Blackberry, so quoting is broken)
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----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Puttick <>
To: robert weir <>
Cc: opendocument-users <>
Sent: Wed Aug 19 12:31:54 2009
Subject: Re: [opendocument-users] Fixing corrupted odt
Well, I think it is not overly sensitive, but the people who write tenders
"tend" to disagree - I'll try and gently prise it out of their
over-sensitive fingers tomorrow. After all, I guess no one on this list has
a competing commercial interest in the archaelogical excavation of human
remains...
I have got this far - namely you can delete/replace most anything in the
within the file and still get the same error; delete/replace content.xml and
file opens, though of course without content... Opening content.xml with an
XML-aware application e.g. Kate ties it in knots, using all the spare CPU on
a dual core laptop. Opening content.xml in OpenOffice as a plain text file
and, following a tip on OpenOffice forum, deleting everything between the
<office:automatic-styles> tag resulted in the same error; deleting
everything between <office:body> got an opening document, though of course
without (visible) content...
Chris
----- "robert weir" <> wrote:
> 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
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