Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

In open office writer 2.2 I saved a current .otd file, now when I open it I get an error message (displayed below) the file seems to still be intact. Does anyone know how to how to correct this problem or get around it, I'm updating to 2.3 right now in hopes that it corrects the problem, but any advice is appreciated. Thank You.

That message means that the XML code that your document uses has an error in it.

About the only thing you can do is unzip the .odt file and poke around to try and find the error and fix it using a text editor. That sometimes works, but it's not for the faint of heart.

If you want to upload your document somewhere, or PM me for an email address, I can give it a look.

Thanks, I sent you a PM. Has anyone had any experience with this?

Yes it's not a frequent issue but it happens (never experienced that one after 2 years using OOo on both Windows and Linux). Usually, it's a XML tag that has been lost so OOo cannot understand the structure of the file. The trick is to find the missing tag, to fix it with a text editor and to rezip the file. The hardest here is to find a good XML editor to do that. Under Windows, I had tested several but I don't remember which one was the best (perhaps Notepad 2 or something like that).

This one was different than I've seen before, but easy to fix. It had a three-byte character sequence that was invalid as UTF-8 data, so OOo was refusing to open the file. Simply editing out those three bytes was all it took to fix it.

I just use emacs, BTW.

Mosephus:
Do you have any suspicions as to what caused this? It would be great to file a bug report, but we would need to be able to reproduce the problem.