General ⇒ Multiple Occurence of invalid Characters

[supaman5]

I have been writing a project in using TeXnicCenter for a couple of months, accessing it everyday and it has worked fine. I tried opening it this morning and I have over 100 lines of little black rectangles with "NUL" written in them. All of my work is gone. Is there any way to retrieved my last saved document. I've still got the output files etc.

The error is "text line contains invalid character." It's repeated over 100 times.

[cgnieder]

Information for potential helpers: this question has also been asked on TeX.sx.

Our board rules clearly state that a link to cross posts has to be given:

A crossposting is always contra-productive. But there is nothing really against it as long as it is mentioned. This means that a direct link has to be added. So other users who want to help are preserved from double efforts and waste of time.

Regards and welcome to the LaTeX community.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

welcome to the board!

Look for a file with the extension .bak in the same directory as your original main document. It could be an automatically made backup. It seems that it's supported, when I open the menu Tools/ Options.

backup.png (26.72 KiB) Viewed 2870 times

Make a copy of it, rename the copy to the .tex extension, and open it. Before you do anything, better make a copy of the whole directory first as a backup.

Stefan

[supaman5]

I've tried deleting and renaming the aux file, but still get NUL when I open the tex. I tried using a file recovery program "ShadowExplorer" and no luck. Does anyone know where the .bak files would be located if any exist? Also, I still have a log file of when the files were working properly if that helps me at all?

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Does anyone know where the .bak files would be located if any exist?

In the same directory as your defective file.

Also, I still have a log file of when the files were working properly if that helps me at all?

It could help in rebuilding. If recovery fails, you could copy & paste the text from the PDF document into a new document. The information in the logfile gives helpful information for recreating your preamble:

• document class and settings
• used packages, possibly options and settings
• margins and layout information, since the geometry package writes that to the .log file
• font information, and more.

Stefan

[supaman5]

Thanks, rewriting the project now.