[Wylug-help] OOWriter Disaster

[Dave Fisher]

I've just opened several *.odt files and found them unreadable in OO
Writer 2.4.

I unzipped the files to find that the data in content.xml seems to be
intact.

I'm guessing that there was something wrong with the way that a previous
version of OO Writer encoded them, because only comparatively recent
files are affected, i.e. files written in much older versions of OO
Writer appear fine.

I've tried opening them in other ODF-compatible apps, and they are
completely unreadable.

These are business-critical invoices (the only files that I ever write
in a wordprocessor) so I have no choice but to re-construct them by
hand, if necessary.

Obviously, I'd prefer some less tiresome method.  One option I've
considered is installing older versions of OO Writer, but that could be
very time-consuming, with an unknown likelihood of success.


meta.xml for one file says it was written in:
  
  OpenOffice.org/2.3$Unix OpenOffice.org_project/680m5$Build-9221

Any ideas how I should go about the recovery?

Should I try to get an identical version of OO 2.3?  If so,  what's the
best method (I'm currently on Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron)?

Or would I be better off trying to fix the problem in a text editor ...
I'm probably not familiar enough with the ODT format to do that without
some advice.

Dave