OK, moving from frustrated to mad

[hrj]

I've been getting a lot of use out of doing my daily writing in Quickoffice on the iPad, accessing my files via Dropbox. Mostly it works wonderfully. But every once in a while, something gets corrupted. The current error message is "illegal xml character", which I think has been the message on previous occasions. And then I can't open the file for love or money, not in Quickoffice, not in Word. Peculiarly enough, I can view the entire file without problems using Apple's "spacebar preview" function.** (Thus resulting once in a very annoying session of re-typing an entire file from the preview display.) Oh, and I can open the file in nuts-and-bolts text editors like Text Wrangler -- I just haven't figure out how to use that to identify the problem and repair it. A certain level of safety net is also provided by my regular drag-and-drop backups of my Dropbox contents to my hard disk.

Once, I thought the problem happened because I tried to save and close a file when I was going through a wireless dead zone. (The stretch between the Rockridge and Macarthur stations on BART, for some unknown reason, is totally dead.) So I've learned that if I get a save error, I just save a local copy on the iPad and copy it over to Dropbox later. But this time, the last time I was editing the file, it was on my laptop while at the coffee shop (but not connected to wifi -- just editing the resident copy of the Dropbox file). And I've done that any number of times without having later problems with the file.

Taking a look at the raw code in Text Wrangler, the only thing I've noticed so far (other than the annoying messiness of the seamy xml underbelly of the file) is that some of my apostrophes are ascii characters and some are the xml encoding "'". But both of those should be valid xml characters.

Hmm, and there's something displaying as an o-umlaut when perhaps it should be the xml code for that? But I composed that part through Word, not through Quickoffice. So if it's the problem, then the problem is that Word is saving characters that it later refuses to recognize? Or is all this irrelevant and the invalid character is something else entirely?

In any event, the problem isn't the specific invalid character but the problem that, at unpredictable intervals and for no obvious reason, Very Important Files are becoming corrupted resulting in an annoying amount of work to reconstruct them. And if it's the Quickoffice/Dropbox interface that's causing the problem, then all the workarounds will be annoying. (E.g., do all my active editing on resident files on the iPad and then copy back and forth to edit them on the laptop ... and to back them up.) I've been Googling keywords describing the problem but haven't turned up anything useful yet. (Or any indication that this is a problem other people are having.)

**ETA: Actually, no. I can view up to the next-to-last sentence in chapter 1. And the code immediately following that shows absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. So I'm back to having no clue what the illegal character is. But now between the preview and being able to crack the raw code in Text Wrangler, I've reconstructed the most recent version of the file. Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder whether I should write my working drafts in rtf instead. It would help if I knew where the corruption was coming from.

Comments

[ursula]

You know Dropbox saves the previous versions of your files, right? Can you restore to a version from five minutes earlier, or do all of the versions of the file become corrupted at once?

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that. I'll have to figure out how to access previous versions of files for myself - that kind of record can be nice to have.

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

One thing to know about Word files is the place where most files get corrupted is on the final carriage return. It has something to do with how Word terminates the file. So if you can manage to get it to open, copy everything but that last carriage return and you'll have an uncorrupted file.

Note I said *if* you can get it to open. On a Windows machine, you can usually open Word documents in WordPad even if you can't in Word, but I don't know if there is an analog for Mac.

S

[ursula]

I've had trouble in the past with Dropbox and Excel files: the Dropbox save and the MS Office auto-save interfered with each other, leading to corrupted files. It's possible that Quickoffice has a similar feature.

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought about it, but now that you mention it - I've had that happen before too. Not with Dropbox, but with another system where M$ Word's autosave feature didn't play nice and caused corruption issues. It wasn't a matter of duelling autosaves, just a matter of valid and invalid permission handling.

I turned it off to save my sanity.

S

[xrian.livejournal.com]

You would not be the first person, either, to conclude that despite its near-monopoly status, Word is inherently buggy and annoying. Say I with fervor, since I'm currently doing a fair amount of work in Word, including editing large and complex documents, writing macros, and training other people.