Re: [opendocument-users] Fixing corrupted odt

[Chris Puttick <chris.puttick@thehumanjourney.net>]

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" <robert_weir@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> 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


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