Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Good evening,

I created a series of seven OpenOffice Impress documents for a coaching course. 5 of the 7 of the them became corrupted with the error "Read-Error. Format error discovered in the file in sub-document content.xml at position 2,57240(row,col)." The specific error number is different for each document. Each document is only ten slides long, but they contain coaching diagram images. Unfortunately the documents are too large to upload here.

Is there anything that I can do to recover the documents? And why would it only change five of the seven when they are all largely the same.

Thank you.

Edit: Changed subject, was Read-Error  Make your post understandable by others  -- MrProgrammer, forum moderator

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Plenty of topics about that here. Try: [Tutorial] Format error discovered in sub-document.

This is a bug in AOO, but not in LO, which corrupts the file when

• Edit > Changes ..., is set to RECORD, and
• a user deletes a range of text which includes two comments each of which is attached to a range of text.

Other sequences may also cause the problem but the above procedure is re-produceable.

See Issue 128356 - Track Changes and Annotations on text range can cause corruption. Applies to 4.x (all versions?)

I therefore strongly recommend users who use tracked changes to move to LibreOffice.

This may not be the case with an Impress document which is what the OP has problems with.

JaredB wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 7:29 am Unfortunately the documents are too large to upload here.

Upload them to a file share site such as mediafire, Dropbox or Google Drive.

JaredB wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 7:29 am Is there anything that I can do to recover the documents? And why would it only change five of the seven when they are all largely the same.

They can almost certainly be recovered. We don't know all the ways in which the bug is triggered but it is definitely a bug in AOO.

robleyd wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 12:52 pm This may not be the case with an Impress document which is what the OP has problems with.

True. The Writer method is reproduceable but, as I said, "Other sequences may also cause the problem". The buggy code is identical for Writer and Impress.

Hopefully this works for sharing the files. I have started using LO now, but obviously it is too late for the five corrupted set of slides.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/6vl1a8fg ... F.odp/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/7rk4i37z ... M.odp/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/4m71m4ei ... D.odp/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/z17giqjv ... B.odp/file
https://www.mediafire.com/file/9k8dnwz2 ... r.odp/file

Could you check if any of the files available at this linkresemble the lost slide set?

When shared, the files contain the text content, but lose all formatting and images. As soon as you try to view it as a slide it crashes.

Try this repaired file. It opened OK for me in AOO and worked as a presentation. Note that I added qqqqq to some text so as to find the error in the file - you need to remove it.

The error was one I have not seen before where the attribute draw:mirror-vertical was repeated, the first time being FALSE, the second being TRUE. As draw:mirror-horizontal was set to FALSE, and as the TRUE was the second instance, I deleted the TRUE instance. YOu will need to check your presentation still looks OK.

The repaired file is perfect. Thank you so much.

I'll do the others as well if no-one beats me too it

These all had the identical error and now work for me: (2) Role of HM.odp, (3) Role of CD.odp, (4) Role of FB.odp and (5) Role of Goalkeeper.odp

All opened with AOO and the presentations worked.

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

I can't thank you enough.