Text Edit Won't Open

I have a really important document that normally opens in Text Edit and today it won't - it just says "the file could not be opened because it is not in the right format". and something about it possibly being truncated etc.

The only different thing I did last time I worked on it was change the font to a larger size,

Do you think it's now to big it won't open in text edit - it's 976 kb

May be I accidently did something else before I saved it last time but i don't know what. Thankyou so much for any help.

well there is always the possibility that it got corrupted (maybe due to a bad segment on the drive or just a glitch)

when it tells you it's not the right format, that doesn't mean size, just the document type, any chance you edited the file name and deleted the extension? for example renaming a file called "myFile.txt" to only "myNewFile" ? if you type back the extension it should work

do you maybe have Open Office or Pages or any other text editor you could use? try to open it up with something different

you could repair permissions, surprisingly it can solve lots of problems

or you can try copying it to a different location

Edit.
ok there is another way, but you won't like it
from the Terminal you can either use the "cat" command to see the document or use a shell editor like vim or emacs:

"cat filename.extension" ... from here you can easily copy by selecting, it will write the file as output
or
"vim filename.extension" ... not very friendly if you don't know the shortcuts, this will open up an editor

You can also

"more filename.extension"

which would give you the opportunity to do things like go through a page at a time or search by using..

/searchterm

Hi

Thanks for all your help - I never used terminal before and I haven't yet been able to succeed with it but I will keep trying - HOWEVER I now wonder whether it won't open because I renamed the file after I saved using a mixture of Hebrew and English letters - אפריל Stories.doc - do you think the language mix is the problem - I cannot remember what the file was called before - is there a way I can find out what it was previously called?

actually it can't be the above problem of mixed letters - I just realised I have another file saved in mixed letters and it opens fine.

I tried : more filename extension and it said that no such file existed.

Yet when I look at the properties of the file it says there is 976 kb of information in it so I know it still exists.

Also terminal didn't do anything when I wrote cat and vim.

It won't open in Pages either. It was saved as a doc extension I tried changing it to txt extension but that also did not work. I am really at a loss what to do to open it and have no idea what caused this.

ok you need to change the extension to whatever it was when it was created! if it was created with TextEdit then by default it's .rtf

sorry for not being clear with the terminal, you need to get to the directory of your file before those commands work:

"cd directoryName" to go to a directory in your current path
"cd.." to jump up one directory level
"ls" to see what directories there are in your current path

you can use the whole path to jump directy to your file
the terminal opens in your home folder (~) so if you have the file stored in your Documents folder (i mean the default documents in your user folder) then you just run the terminal and type:

cd Documents
or
cd Documents/documentsSubdirectory/.../.../.../

then once you are in the correct directory you can use what was described above with cat or more


If the file was on your Desktop in the folder myStories:
Run Terminal
Type:
cd Desktop/myStories/
cat hebrewStories.extension ... or ... more hebrewStories.extension


EDIT:
the problem with using cat or more is that you probably will get a whole bunch of non-sense text along with your writting so it might not be too clear to see your text

scathe said:

EDIT:
the problem with using cat or more is that you probably will get a whole bunch of non-sense text along with your writting so it might not be too clear to see your text

Click to expand...

I agree. If it's rich text, then this is true. My guess is that if you created it in TextEdit, it will be rich text.

Have you tried something like Bean?