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Recovery of OpenDocument files

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 1:40 pm
by ^rooker
[PROBLEM]
Unfortunately, it sometimes may happen that your .odt file is broken. In my case it was because that file was formerly a .doc file - and the conversion seems to have messed up the styles.xml within the newly saved .odt.

I ended up with blue pages and strange vertical lines across them - For some reason those blue pages were actually tables of some sort. strange.

[SOLUTION]
But the OpenDocument file format came to the rescue!

Method 1)
Simply open the file with your favorite .zip archive manager (e.g. right-click on it an choose "archive manager" in Gnome) and then delete the "styles.xml".
Re-open it with OpenOffice and your text should be there.

Method 2)
In case more files than just your styles.xml puked on themselves, you can transplant your "content.xml":
- Create a new, empty OpenOffice Write document and save it.
- Unpack "content.xml" from your broken file.
- Put this content.xml into your empty, new file.
That's it. Your text should be back again.