Hanging document

[Anne Claar]

Dear OO users,

I have been using OO with great satisfaction for almost three years now. I got a problem in april 2006 which was 'solved' for me. Now I seem to have a very similar problem. I work with OO 2.O when I open a certain document (17 pages) in 'writer' it blocks as soon as I open it: meaning that I cannot do anything, if I wait long enough it will say programm not responding if I close it asks me whether to 'end now' (and loose 'everything' - as if I could do anything!) or 'cancel'. Then follows the error reporting, if I try to open the document again I first have to recover it, after the recovery you press 'next' get the document open but already blocked again. The problem seems to have started when I was scrolling too fast through the document. I do not seem to have the problem with all documents in writer some respond as normal.

Hope somebody can help me,
Best Wishes
Anne Claar

[FPeters]

Does the document contain content embedded from the net (like images or alike)? This may cause the software to freeze when trying to load the content off the net. Even if your internet connection is available, it may take a while to update if there are many such images. Is the CPU load high while the software appears stuck?

If you have a corrupt file, you're probably out of luck if the software freezes on load. You can still unzip the *.odt and open the content.xml in a text or xml editor to rescue the textual content, at least.

-f

[Anne Claar]

Dear f

There are no images in the file and I am not aware of content that would need loading from the net, I all typed it in myself. How do I 'unzip the *.odt and open the content.xml in a text or xml editor' or where can I find how to do that?

Thank you
Anne Claar

[FPeters]

Hi Anne,

The odt file is "just" a zip file with a different extension that contains the actual xml data of the document.

The easiest way is to copy the file and give it a zip extension so it is automatically recognized
by unzip utilities. If you're using Windows XP or above, the operating system should be able
to handle that. You will find several files inside the zip container. One of them being
content.xml which has all the content in XML format.

If you don't feel confident working with XML files and there is no confidential stuff in the file
I'd be willing to give you a hand. Send me a private mail (click on my user name in the "by" line above)
with the doc attached.

-f

[Hagar Delest]

There are also 2 methods that could fix it :
1. By removing the styles.xml file in the odt.
2. By removing the automatic styles in the content.xml file of the .odt.

If there is no sensitive data, you can also attach it to your post here.

Can you also upgrade to a more recent version ? Latest is 2.3.1.

NB: moved the thread to the Writer forum and changed the title.