Strange behaviour of Open Office

I OCR scanned a document with ABBYY FineReader 6.0 and exported it to Word which was in my laptop. I copied this to a memory stick and downloaded it into my desktop which doesn't have Word but I managed to get the download to go into Wordpad instead. Then I started to do another job but I saw the title of my document in Open Office Writer so I opened it. This is strange to begin with but there's more. I began editing the document in OO and suddenly it started to recover autonomously after a so called crash, or so it said. I didn't notice any crash and everything continued editing as before so I ignored the message. It repeated this recovery several times, each time accompanied by a green line spreading along the bottom of the screen until the recovery was complete. When I'd finished editing I tried to save as (doc title) in (type of file) in the usual way but the screen said there had been a failure and that the document was being retrieved from the original file. And that's what it did, completely destroying my edits and giving back the document I'd started with.

How did OO get hold of what was in Wordpad?

What's the so called recovery all about? Why did it recover?

It didn't get it from Wordpad it restored the original version you opened in OpenOffice.

Its useful if your PC crashes as the next time OpenOffice is loaded up it will try to recovery any lost documents. If you have an unsaved important document then it really comes in handy.

Unfortunately on this occasion its had the opposite effect.

It will have recovered if it detected a crash - even if you didn't notice the crash. OO might have recovered itself from a small blip which is why you didn't even notice.

I see Love2print. It looks as if my Open Office may be faulty because it keeps on crashing. The version of the document I opened in Open Office came via the Word-bearing laptop so presumably it was still in Word? Therefore if I were to convert my scan into Word using Finereader ie before I export it, it should be possible then to export it into Open Office in the desktop instead of to Word in the laptop? I tried this and unfortunately there was no tab offering to do the conversion in Finereader. But I'm told by ABBYY that other versions of Finereader do have such conversion possibilities. Again unfortunately these versions cost more that what I could get Word for. It looks like I'll have to give up and fork out for Word, doesn't it?

Here are some links to try.

First AbiWord which is a simple and fairly good word processor that also saves and converts in various formats. Install the English language pack as well.

https://www.abisource.com/

Then this is FreeOCR software which will scan and save also in various formats.

http://www.paperfile.net/

Not sure how good the FreeOCR is but there is a tutorial on the Online help page. I use AbiWord but mainly for creating documents and then printing them out but have not used it for converting.

Give both a try as they are free and you may just find them OK for what you want.

Thanks apelike. They look very interesting and I'll try them and let you know how I get on. But it won't be straight away as I have other things to do first. My reason for using a computer with Open Office to do this OCR scanning rather than my laptop which has Word is that the laptop is now 9 years old and it can't last forever. I've been using it to receive OCR scans from the printer/scanner so I could put them on a stick and thereby get them into the desktop. It's working now but I wanted to get the desktop to do what I need before the laptop dies on me and from then on won't be able to help me to sort the desktop out. Does all that make sense?

---------- Post added 15-03-2017 at 19:49 ----------

I used the first link you gave me apelike and it worked 100%. I'm delighted. I scanned documents with a free OCR program and it exported the OCR scan to the one in your link. I could edit everything just as I wanted. Thank you very much.

I used the first link you gave me apelike and it worked 100%. I'm delighted. I scanned documents with a free OCR program and it exported the OCR scan to the one in your link. I could edit everything just as I wanted. Thank you very much.

Very glad it all worked out for you.

Been using AbiWord for a few years now, pity no one has compiled the new version to Windows though as I prefer it to OO, or what its now called. Glad the OCR worked out as well.

Is that Abi Word as in Gnome Office? The only problem with that in GNU/Linux is that it is incompatible with Orca, the screen reader for those users with little or no vision.

Is that Abi Word as in Gnome Office? The only problem with that in GNU/Linux is that it is incompatible with Orca, the screen reader for those users with little or no vision.

Yes, it is also part of the Gnome Office suite but was ported over to Windows but the latest version is Linux only as no one is wanting to support and port. I have successfully compiled RT kernels and music apps in Linux and would like to do this as well. Trouble is I don't know where to start and if there was a guide I would give it a go.