Pages keep increasing and make LibreOffice crash

[Esmitex]

Hi,
I have a document that was 8 or 9 pages long, which contains tables. As I know of there were no macro. It was a .doc file that I saved as a .odt file. Until an hour ago, the file was fine, and suddenly it started freezing when I scrolled down. I noticed the pages number kept increasing… but the word count remains the same. It has gone up to 12000+ pages. I tried to save a copy as a .zip file but I cannot open it. I updated Libreoffice, it didn’t change anything. I tried to open the file in google drive but it’s freezing as well.

It contains personal and work-related info, but I cannot edit it… so I wouldn’t like to share it publicly. I can’t even open the print preview. Though, I’ve opened it on my phone with OpenDocumentReader and it displays fine.

Can someone please help me?

Setup:

• Mac OS 14.3.1 (23D60) M1PRO
• LibreOffice Version: 24.2.1.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
  Build ID: db4def46b0453cc22e2d0305797cf981b68ef5ac
  CPU threads: 8; OS: macOS 14.3.1; UI render: Skia/Metal; VCL: osx
  Locale: fr-FR (en_FR.UTF-8); UI: en-US
  Calc: threaded

[ajlittoz]

I can’t help for the expanding page number, but I recommend your remove this file from your question as it contains too many personal data. Everything your post here becomes public!

I have already seen related questions on the site but I failed to retrieve them.

[Esmitex]

I found one that recommended to convert the file to a zip and open it to remove pictures but mine doesn’t contain pictures, and it displays normally on my phone.

[EarnestAl]

Might still be related to Bug 150300 - Writer adds blank pages indefinitely when “as character” image is larger than the page and is followed by text

Our possibly another referenced bug, Bug 149424 - Layout loop in doc files

There might be an image like a white rectangle as background in the document. Quite often such things appear in files from Word.

I would be inclined to open (or open a copy of) the file in a zip program to check for images. If you don’t have something like 7Zip (free), you can change the extension from .odt to .zip and open it in a file manager.

[ajlittoz]

You have indeed one picture in it. I deleted it but didn’t update META-INF/manifest.xml. This doesn’t change the page loop once you start scrolling. content.xml is plagued with direct formatting (but this is probably a consequence from converting DOC → ODF without precaution).

[Hrbrgr]

Hi @Esmitex , on the first page with the table there was a frame in the background which I deleted.
Now the file is normal up to page 8.
You should check if everything is there.

I have sent you the file by direct message.

[Esmitex]

I tried that but the zip file failed to open.

[Esmitex]

I’ve been able to open the file in TextEdit, I copied pasted the content in a new document. I’ve installed Word to edit the file instead of LibreOffice.

[EarnestAl]

@Esmitex

I tried that but the zip file failed to open.

The file needs to closed in LibreOffice first.

[Esmitex]

It was a copy so it was closed. It worked with the unarchiver though.

[mikekaganski]

FTR: opening the problematic ODT using MS Word 2016 created infinite pages, too. It was a bad document structure created by user, who inserted a huge table into a header, thus making the header take the whole page size, and so, any word processor has to add more and more tables to attempt to find some space for the actual page content, which never succeeds.