A mysterious error exporting to LibreOffice with Pathway

Question

A colleague asked for help because his attempts to export to a LibreOffice document failed. LibreOffice refused to open the .ODT file, reporting an obscure error like this:

It turns out the problem arose because the file name for a figure in the text was misspelled. (for instance, if the image file is “tent & courtyard.jpg” but you typed “tent and courtyard.jpg” in Paratext, you’d get this error. I don’t know why LibreOffice reports the error this way, but I’ll pass on to the rest of you, if you get one of these odd errors with a ODT document made by Pathway, check the file names for your figures in the text.

Answer 1

You might want to avoid using filenames containing & (as well as
< and > and perhaps a few other characters), because these are
used in XML syntax, which is what ODT uses to store its data.

Answer 2

Perhaps that makes sense to avoid & in a file name. But in this case, the file name had a & in it, and when the matching string was put in the Paratext project, the export worked fine.