Corrupted document (Word 2000)

Topic

New Reply

Can anyone explain a one page doc file with text and graphics, saved as a standard doc file, which has replaced all the text with small uniform size squares. The graphics are o.k. but the text is lost. The properties shows it to be one page, 5 paragraphs, 22 lines and 464 words. File attached

Reply | Quote

Replies

I’ve had “major loss” corruption like this when saving during network problems (some genius rebooted the server without telling anyone who was editing files from it). Basically, the lost chunk of the file is not recoverable and you need to work from a backup or printout. Maybe someone else knows a secret that I don’t know.

Reply | Quote

I cannot explain the exact cause of this issue, yet. But attached is a non-corrupt version of the document with the exception of the quote matks.
I accomplished this by selecting all text and changing the font to ‘Arial Alternative’ This is the attached document.
You can now secect the text (Be careful of avoiding the graphics), do ‘Edit/Copy’, and then with the text selected do ‘Edit/Paste Special’ and selected ‘unformatted text’. Once done, save the document with a differewnt name. Now the text can be selected and changed to the font desired without the boxes popping up. At least this worked for me.

Arial Alternative supplied by Microsoft especially for use with HyperTerminal. It is located in the OTHERMINITEL folder on the Win95 CD, or at the official download site ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/software/otherutils.htm ), or at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/download/mintel.exe

Hope this helps.

Reply | Quote

Bob, that’s an amazing find.

Another download page is CD-ROM Extras for Microsoft Windows 95 Upgrade, and from there the .exe file download link is http://download.microsoft.com/download/win…N-US/mintel.exe%5B/url%5D. (I didn’t actually try it myself.)

So… we might be able to figure this out. If you copy the first word in the document and Paste Special as plain text into a new document, and compare the unicode values of the characters in each document, perhaps there is a uniform shift that could be applied to the original document to correct it “in place” as it were. And if we knew that value, maybe it would be possible to conjure up some speculation as to the cause…

Reply | Quote

Another way to fix it would be the macro below.

Somehow, the text got interpreted as using a “decorative” font, so the codes of the characters are off by hex F000.
Characters from “decorative” fonts like “Symbol” or “Wingdings” are assigned to a “private use” code page starting at &HF000 = 61440 in Word.

The macro corrects this — but doesn’t fix the smart quotes and a few other characters.

Oh … just found an even easier and better way to fix it: Save as HTML, and reopen it!

Klaus

Sub Decorative2Regular()
Dim myRange As Range

Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
Do
  Selection.Collapse (wdCollapseEnd)
  Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
  With Selection.Find
    .Text = "[" & ChrW(61440) & "-" _
    & ChrW(61695) & "]"
    .Forward = True
    .Wrap = wdFindStop
    .Format = True
    .MatchCase = False
    .MatchWholeWord = False
    .MatchAllWordForms = False
    .MatchSoundsLike = False
    .MatchWildcards = True
  End With
  If Selection.Find.Execute Then
    Set myRange = ActiveDocument.Content
    With myRange.Find
      .Text = "^u" & _
      Trim(Str(AscW(Selection.Text) _
      And &HFFFF&))
      .Replacement.Text = _
      ChrW((AscW(Selection.Text) _
      And &HFFFF&) - &HF000&)
      .Replacement.Font.Name = "Arial"
      .Forward = True
      .Wrap = wdFindContinue
      .Format = True
      .MatchCase = True
    End With
    myRange.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
  Else
    Exit Sub
  End If
Loop
End Sub

Reply | Quote