Re: AbiWord problem

(please CC this individual - may not be on the list)

Hello! If there is no data in the file, then document history will not
work, as you may have suspected. There are a few ideas, though - First,
I'd look in the same folder as the document to see if there are any
.BAK, .SAVED, or .CRASHED files - these would be autosave or
autosave-on-crash files respectively. Renaming them to remove the extra
extension should allow you to open them, if they exist. Similarly,
search your hard drive for files with this extension (Start, Search
Files and Folders or similar, depending on your Windows version, then
put in the extensions above in the "file name" box) and try opening those.

Unfortunately, if you saved and there was no file actually written,
there is no way to retrieve that data short of perhaps editing the hard
drive directly. The backup files are your best bet - turning on
Auto-save in the future is probably a good idea (under Tools,
Preferences). There are a number of reasons aside from AbiWord that
might cause a normally-saved file to not be there: Windows acting
strangely about low free space, saving to a removeable drive (with write
caching) and not properly removing the device giving Windows time to
write cached data, power failure interrupting a cached write to the hard
drive, and so on. Furthermore, it is strongly recommended that documents
in progress be saved in ABW format - it is very nearly failsafe, and any
strange data problems that may crop up can be fixed simply with a text
editor. Choosing to "Save-as" an RTF is always an option from an ABW
file, whereas keeping documents in progress in RTF/MS Word may result in
some loss of formatting since not all AbiWord features map perfectly due
to design differences and feature disparities.

Sorry about the less-than-entirely-positive news... Hopefully the note
about the backup/SAVED files can help you out here. I have sent this
email also to the user list in case anyone else has better ideas. (FYI,
irc.gnome.org is also known as GIMPnet in Xchat, but can also be added
manually to the list if you can't find it) Good luck!

Ryan

cdekorne@verizon.net wrote:
> Ryan,
> Forgive my intrusion, but I am in a panic. I read a (cached) post to a
> defunct blog in which you state: " Dataloss bugs are taken extremely
> seriously and fixed quickly, if it’s not fixed already. " This gives
> me some hope.
>
> The problem I experienced with AbiWord is this: I tried to open a file
> that I saved Friday night 12/8. When I tried to open, I got message
> that Abiword cannot open because it appear to be "an invalid
> document." I was hoping that if it was a missaved event I would be
> able to use Document History to open an earlier version, but it won't
> open.
>
> I originally opened the file in Abiword as a .doc since I was planning
> to send to coworker that only uses Word. There were no tables in the
> file, only text, though I was doing a lot of color and font changes to
> highlight text for coworker's attention. This caused frequent crashes.
> If I try to open in Word or in Notebook it launches a blank file.
> There appears to be 0kb in the file
>
> I just started using AbiWord last week. I downloaded vers. 2.4.6. The
> file represents several days of work that I could not recreate in same
> way. Is there anything that can be done to recover an earlier version?
>
> I have tried logging on to Xchat, but am unfamiliar with this app and
> can't find which network the irc.gnome.org server is on, or otherwise
> find an #abiword channel. I have sent a request to subscribe to the
> user's Mailing List but Majordomo@abisource.com won't accept the
> message with my authorization key (continues to bounce back). And I
> opened an account on Buzilla but have yet to receive email back
> allowing me to login.
>
> Any help you can give me, either connecting to #abiword channel on
> Xchat, or to User List, or otherwise helping to retrieve the data, I
> would be immensely grateful. I'm even willing to compensate for
> professional assistance. This is an extremely important document to me.
>
> Thank you, Clayton DeKorne
>
>

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
AbiWord Win32 Platform Maintainer: www.abisource.com
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: www.cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
"Optimism is the father that leads to achievement."
 -- Helen Keller
"The folder structure in a modern Linux distribution such as Ubuntu
was largely inspired by the original UNIX foundations that were
created by men with large beards and sensible jumpers."
 -- Jono Bacon, The Ubuntu Guide
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