I looked to see if I could change the document from .abw to .xml as some had suggested but unable to do so. Also will not allow to open in OpenOffice.
I've been working on this document off and on for days, as well as other documents. I can open some documents but it seems AbiWord takes a notion sometimes to refuse to open some.
I know you understand how infuriating this can be after you have been working on a project for so long and now all of a sudden you have lost all your work.
What gives?

There have been issues before "abiword saves document it can't open, inserts duplicate props attributes in xml " on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...d/+bug/1248011 this was in 2013. Does it fall ever time can you export to plain text. This way it's not a total loss.

Regards
Ray

Welcome to the forum. I am not familiar with Abiword, but I have had documents that Windows office
didn't want to open because of content, maybe Abiword has a content filter?
There has never been a time that I couldn't open a document using Libre Office, have you tried Libre?

Not all AbiWord documents fail to open. It seems that AbiWord has its moments. I have lost about five documents the last month and most are gone for good.
Somehow I sent the last document to internet and managed to copy it into Open Office. It transferred as one elongated word but amazingly it copied into Open Office as it should have. Cut some work down.
I'm thinking seriously about doing the same thing with all my documents, especially after reading that others have had the same issue. You don't want to work on something, only to loose it for no obvious reason.
I don't like Open Office so much, it isn't as user friendly as I'd like but I would rather keep my work.

Hi...

Welcome to the forum

One of the questions that come to mind is didn't you make any backups of these documents in their original state? That way you wouldn't have lost anything.

Regards...

I've never thought much about backups to such documents and I've never needed them before. I'm thought when you saved something, it stayed saved unless you had a computer crash.
These days, I've learned to save stuff on one of those USB drives but the documents I'm referring to are ones I'd just been working on and figured I'd put them on the drive when I was done with them in a day or so. It never dawned on me the program would save some documents and not others.

at one time some companies (omitted today) released Word formats incompatible going backward, reverse engineered, so that new users sharing files forced last version users to upgrade

that shouldn't be a problem with an abi word file

it could be corrupt though - maybe it's right

why not post it on gogole point us to where it is? the real hackers that can fix it cannot speculate what is wrong from a green fish user without allot of info.

easier if you just post it and ask if sombody can post back the fixed file

also: you might look for a website advertising it converts formats - but i dont know if one exists for that format

I appreciate the offer but that is a bit complicated for me. I'm not that computer friendly. Right now I'm working with Open Office. I'll see what happens.
Again, thanks for the offer to try and figure it all out. You could be right about corruption. You never know these days. I just didn't know I was connected to the internet when using AbiWord.

I'm not familiar with Abiword, but it seems that the .abw format is xml. Try loading the offending file into a text editor. Ther might be some tiny corruption in the header that prevents Abiword coping: I've had that happen to a .odt file and I was able to recover it.

I just noticed are you on Windows 8?

Yes, I am on Windows 8.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <General> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Thanks, I got more response than I thought would ever happen.

Marking as resolved. My first time on this thing. I was told to mark resolved under Thread Tools but there is no 'resolved' under that.
I want to thank everyone for the help they provided.