If most of the Corel VENTURA™ documents are behaving as expected, but you are having problems opening, printing or navigating through a specific Corel VENTURA (*.VP) document, you may have a corrupt element in the file. There are many methods to troubleshoot, isolate and remove corruption within a publication. Using any combination of the following suggestions should reduce the amount of time required to do so. Before proceeding, ensure the most recent release of Corel VENTURA has been installed. The latest maintenance release is Revision C, build 1465. To check the installed revision, click Help, About Corel VENTURA. If the revision is older than 7.1465, contact Customer Service. Note: Before attempting any of the suggestion in this document, make a backup of the file using Windows Explorer. Opening There are three options for retrieving a file that will not open. • Try a opening the document on a different computer. A clean system with more RAM may be able to open a file that will not load on other computers. • Open a backup of the file. • Rebuild the document using external files, and the original stylesheet. • Restoring from Backup If you cannot open, navigate or print the Corel VENTURA file, try one or all of the backup files created automatically by Corel VENTURA. Auto-backup: If Corel VENTURA is not exited normally because of a computer problem, crash, or power failure, when you relaunch Corel VENTURA, the message "VENTURA has detected an auto-saved publication. Would you like to retrieve it?" will be generated. This file is stored in the TEMP folder, but is deleted after this prompt. Therefore, it is recommended that you recover this file when prompted, and save it under a new file name. By default, an auto backup is created every 20 minutes. To change the auto backup feature, click Tools, Options, Save. Backup on save: Another backup file is created every time you successfully save a Corel VENTURA document. It is located in the same folder as the original file. The name of the file will depend on the settings in VENTURA.INI, refer to Fax on Demand document #5609 for more information. The name may be "BACKUP OF FILENAME.VP" or FILENAME.$VP. To verify Make Backup On Save, is enabled click Tools, Options, Save. This is enabled by default, and it is strongly recommended that it not be disabled. Note: To open backup files with the extension $VP, click All Files from the Files of Type list box in the Open dialog box. Other backups: In some instances, the backup file may contain the same corruption as the original. If this occurs, the best option is to retrieve a personal or network backup copy of the file. Network backups are usually created regularly by the System Administrator. To create a personal backup, click File, Save As, and select another folder or filename. Personal backups are more manageable if a naming convention like "ORIGINAL FILENAME DATE.VP" is used. A final backup option, may be to restore an archived version that was saved using Corel Versions. For more information, refer to the Corel Versions section of the online Help. If the file cannot be restored from a backup, remove any external graphics that would appear on the first four pages of the publication. This can be done by renaming the graphic files in Windows Explorer. Despite following these suggestions, you may not have a working copy of the publication. In this case, you will have to rebuild some or all the publication. The following information should reduce the amount of time this will take. Issues Navigating or Printing If you are able to open the document, but have trouble navigating to certain pages or printing the document, there may be a corrupt element. However, there are many possible resolutions. Note: There may be other reasons why a certain document will not print. For example, if the document that will not print is extremely large compared to the other files, the computer may be running into low resource issues, such as a lack of hard drive space for spooling, or limited RAM. If you are attempting to print the document to a different printer than you normally use, the printer connection may faulty, rather than the document. The system administrator should be able to determine if this is a possibility. Troubleshooting the Publication If a publication file is corrupt but can be opened, the corruption is often isolated to a portion of the document. A publication contains three different elements, the publication, the stylesheet, and the chapters. If the corruption can be isolated to one of these elements, the amount of time required to eliminate the corruption is greatly reduced. Publication: The publication stores a list of the chapters, the stylesheet, all settings in format, publication, and format table of contents/index. The publication is usually the easiest element to rebuild. Troubleshooting a publication can sometimes be more time consuming, than rebuilding the publication. To rebuild the publication, perform the following steps: 1. Click Format, Publication, and enable any general, text before and after, variable and condition settings used in the original publication. 2. Click Format, Table of Contents/Index, and enable any settings used in the original publication. 3. Load the stylesheet, To do this, click Tools, Navigator. Click Publication Manager from the list box. Right-click the new publication, and click Load Stylesheet. 4. In the VENTURA Navigator™ drag all the chapters from the original publication into the new publication. 5. Right-click the new publication, and click Update publication. The Stylesheet: The stylesheet stores all master pages and tags. Tagged paragraphs that do not format correctly, or problems with the master page are often symptoms of a corrupt stylesheet. To see if the stylesheet may be corrupt, load other stylesheets into the publication. If the stylesheets are not identical, the publication will not have the same formatting as the original publication, but if the publication consistently formats according to the new stylesheet the original stylesheet should be rebuilt. Note: Since a publication can have only one stylesheet the terms stylesheet and publication often refer to the same thing in the following section. Rebuilding the stylesheet can be done quickly, but since the corruption may be in tag definition or a master page, it is possible to copy the corruption from the original stylesheet into the new stylesheet when using the following shortcut. To merge tags from the original stylesheet into the new stylesheet 1. Open a new publication, and click Format, Manage Tag List, Merge Tags. 2. Select the original publication, and click Select All, Merge. Repeat this procedure for frame, border, and character tags if they were used in the document. You may receive an error message when you attempt to merge tags. This means that some or all of the tags are corrupted. Try merging the tags a second time, by only selecting some of the tags. If these tags work, then try adding more. Use a process of elimination to add as many tags to the new style sheet as possible. If you need the formatting details for any tag setting, use the STYLEINF script. To use this script click Tools, Scripts, Run/Manage Scripts, STYLEINF, Run Note: If you do not have this script installed, you will need to perform a Custom installation to add it. To copy the master pages from the original publication to the new publication 1. With both publications open, click Tools, Navigator, and click Master Pages from the list box. 2. Drag the master pages from the original publication into the new publication. When rebuilding the new stylesheet be selective. Any tags, or master pages that are not used, or were associated to any unexpected formatting in the original publication, should not be merged into the new stylesheet, and should be recreated in the new stylesheet. A publication that has no text, graphics, or frames (other than those in the master pages) is essentially a stylesheet. To use the new stylesheet, save the new publication, and load the stylesheet from the new publication into any document that may be using a similar but corrupt stylesheet. The Chapter: The chapter stores all text and graphic files (except external graphic files), all frames, and chapter settings. Printing, opening and navigating issues within a single chapter may be caused by a component (text or graphic file) or by problematic pages. Pages that reformat while scrolling through a document, overlapping and disappearing text are symptoms of a corrupt chapter. To isolate elements within a chapter 1. Click File, New, Create Template, and Browse for the original publication 2. Using the Select Components dialog box, you can load a selection of elements within a chapter. For example, if the system stops responding going to page 3 of Chapter 3, and there is a graphic called EXAMPLE.TIF on this page, select all components except EXAMPLE.TIF. If after this there are no issues navigating through this chapter, a new copy of the graphic should be used. If the previous step does not isolate the problem, the chapter will have to be rebuilt. If the chapter is complicated refer to Fax on Demand document #5608. If the chapter is relatively simple, or if the problems remain after following the procedures in document #5608, then the chapter should be rebuilt from scratch. This means creating all frames, and loading the appropriate text and graphic files. Other Options: If the publication will open, but there is a problem with a specific tag, master page, text file, graphic, or frame, the specific item can be removed. To delete a tag refer to the online Help. Note, the bodytext tag cannot be deleted. To delete a master page refer to the online Help. Every publication must have at least one master page. To remove the only master page in a publication 1. Click File, New, and double-click Default. By creating a new publication the corruption of the original master page can be eliminated. 2. Open the original publication. 3. Click Tools, Navigator, and click Master Pages from the list box. 4. If the master page in the original publication is Default Master, right-click on Default Master for the new publication in the Navigator. Rename it with a unique name. 5. Drag the new master page into the original publication using the Navigator. 6. Right-click the master page that should be removed, and click Delete. To delete a text or graphic file refer to the online Help. If a text file is corrupt, it is possible to remove the corrupt elements from the file in a word processor like Corel® WordPerfect®, which will interpret Corel VENTURA markup codes as text. To remove a frame, click it, and press DELETE. If it is difficult to click the frame, click any frame on the page, and press TAB until the frame is selected.