Re: [opendocument-users] Fixing corrupted odt

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

Well, some one on one investigation did get it was suddenly on opening as in before lunch it was fine, now it isn't; and some suggestion of it starting after multiple users had been involved in amending sections.

Structured content has been recovered using Zimbra's "view attachment as HTML" (begging the question of what on earth are they using to render it) and cut and paste into a new template with the resulting doc being fine.

No graphics other than corporate logo which is part of the template (from which many and more complex documents have been created). If it is relevant, the template was originally generated in OpenOffice 2.4 from clean and uses completely custom styles in a lovely (even though I say so myself :) ) heirarchy.

I have run content.xml through a parser (xmllint) against ODF1.1 and ODF1.2 draft (as the generator was OpenOffice 3.1). Both generate errors, and different ones. I'm not at the computer I did the work on, but recall the errors against 1.2 draft as being something like "element p has illegal part "text"" or similar, and for sure it was full of <p:text>  - too many to consider deleting for sure. Disclaimer: me and XML are not friends and I may well have misunderstood one or more instructions...

@Rob: while the tender writing chaps were predictably unwilling to part with the document right now, they think that after they have won/lost some time next week they would be willing for you to have a look.

Chris

----- "Jan Wildeboer" <jwildebo@redhat.com> wrote:

> 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 <chris.puttick@thehumanjourney.net>
> To: robert weir <robert_weir@us.ibm.com>
> Cc: opendocument-users <opendocument-users@lists.oasis-open.org>
> 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" <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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