Re: [opendocument-users] Fixing corrupted odt

[robert_weir@us.ibm.com]

Chris Puttick <chris.puttick@thehumanjourney.net> 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