I was writing a document, and suddenly it turned to gibberish. Looks as though I had been typing in HTML and not regular text. Now, it is gone, just a remnant left,still in english text. How do I get it back? And what happened? Never happened before. Gordon
I cannot guess what you made wrong. However, there is a very good recovery function in LibO and this is set to ON by default. If you did not turn that option off, LibO recovers you document when you start LibO next time.
You also can have look in the backup folder to see if your document is there. You will find the path to this folder in Tools > options > path then look in the window on the right hand site for the path.
“Looks as though I had been typing in
HTML and not regular text.”
gives me the impression that it might be good to have a look at the Writer manual. You can get it free like free beer from: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/