Abiword saves th’day
September 23rd, 2006
a call from a friend asking for some help on a Word doc recovery. That’s how it started. On a 300km train travel, working important docs on a laptop makes the journey happen in a twist. But when adding non redimensioned images to it makes Word crash and take away the file, well, things go ugly. I received a 530MB sized *.wbk file. MS Word could not open it. After a while, everything crashed. I tried Open Office. Well, a strange error, and no results. I came back to Linux. 15 minutes in Windows is just too much damn time. Back in Linux, tried once again with Open Office gettin’ no results. Then, before hacking into the file i remembered i frequently use Abiword. I just like it. Very simple and light. I opened AbiWord, followed by a terminal window with a:
$ top -d2
running, and waited. Abi process started consuming processing time, memory, OS and computer resources. Who doesn’t like to watch geeky processes running ? Ok, after some 2 or 3 minutes that was it. Abiword recovered the file, plus the images. Sweet. Little Abiword is the best! By the way, Gnome 2.16 is out. Give it a look on new features. I am a happy Gnumeric, Abiword, Gimp (hope pfig’s not reading this one), Evolution, Gnome user. I like Gnome integration. OpenOffice is of course for heavy duty stuff, but today, well, today Abi made my day.
AbiWord Community Outreach Project » We’ll call it “Super AbiWord!” said:
[…] AbiWord saves the day for this blogger! I think it’s probably a consensus among the developers that our import/export support is one of our prouder accomplishments to date, and that includes making things work even when the input (such as in this case) is not necessarily entirely sane. This post by one of the libwpd developers (libwpd is the library used by AbiWord to help import WordPerfect documents) is another sign in this direction: Depending on your version of libwpd (2.4.6 for Windows will have it for sure at least), you may have better WordPerfect file loading support than WordPerfect itself! […]
uwog said:
Rockin’! I love it when AbiWord actually makes people happy
- uwog, abi dev.
s/earch/ · One Laptop Per Child News link… said:
[…] … to my blog. I never post the links to my blog but this one by its meaning made me do it. My recent experience with AbiWord (that i use in Linux, besides OpenOffice) saving a 500MB Word backup file from a friend, that MS Word could not restore (not even OpenOffice), was worth to blog about, since it was given as an example of what this nice app can do. It’s on an olpcnews.com article upon a discussion on wether Abiword or a fork will be shipped in the “One Laptop Per Child” machine. And these two are really nice projects wich i believe would integrate well together. […]
Bob said:
any way this can be done in the windows version? i desperately need to recover a .wbk file, installed AbiWord, but it ain’t recognizing the .wbk format and i’m not geek enough to know what to do next… little help?
thanx much
DB
pedro said:
Bob, i used the Linux version.
Tell me what version are you using for Windows Abiword, please.
Can you try to rename it to a .doc and then try to open it using Windows Abiword ?
If you want, i’ll try to recover it for you
Bob said:
hey, thanks for the reply. i didn’t catch it until now, sorry.
it was 2.4.6 i believe. i did rename it to a .doc and was able to open it, but it came up as like 50 pages of macros strokes or other such greek, with some of the original content in there, but not contiguously. very frustrating. i actually paid some online company to recover the document, but even that lost the bulk of the new content. eventully just rewrote the entire thing from scratch… not as fine a work as the original, but done and done.
turns out my mobo was having a meltdown, which cause all this. that’s fixed now too. i would still like to see if the orginal documment can be recovered (or the .wbk merged with the original .doc) but that would just be for posterity. don’t actually NEED it anymore. so no biggie. but thanks for the offer.
cheers,
DB
pedro said:
I am using Abiword 2.4.5 for Linux, and using Gnome plugins.
So, if you had macros, Word macros, it is likely that Abiword could not interpret them. But in these cases, usually, and most of the times, recovering the original content is a great help even if not contiguously. Remember Word .doc format is not an open one. So, if you had not complex formatting on the text…
If you are working on a very important document, i’d say to save it on the editor format, and from times to times, save a copy on an open format, just to have a safe copy of the content. Just in case…