I'm was working on the 2nd edition of The Artists Guide to GIMP Effects tonight when I ran into an ugly bug.  The documents I exchange with my publisher are in RTF format, possibly because its easier for them on the production side though I'm not positive of that.  Anyway, I've been editing these with OpenOffice for quite some time and all has been well.  Until tonight.

Two nights ago I copied and pasted some plain text into the document and then saved and quit.  Tonight when I tried to open it up again the file refused to open.  After about an hour of manually reviewing the RTF my wife suggested trying to open the file on her Mac.  So I copied it to a FOB, took it to her machine and double clicked.  The file opened up to a specific location and stopped.  It displayed everything it could read up to that point.  That gave me a clue to find that point in the RTF (using vi) and remove that line. 

It worked.

I was able to recover the file, sans that one line.  But I also learned a valuable lesson:

OpenOffice doesn't like you to paste text and save as RTF. 

Nasty behaviour if you ask me.  I'm checking with the publisher to see if I can switch to ODT format for all our editing.  If not, I'm going to work on much smaller files so if this ever happens again I won't risk losing nearly as much.

And maybe its time I put these files under source control.  Mere backups aren't quite enough to cover this situation.