The .wxmx file format is based on XML and can save the complete worksheet including things like the zoom factor and the watchlist. It is the preferred file format in wxMaxima.

How to recover data from a broken .wxmx file

Internally most modern XML-based formats are ordinary zip-files. wxMaxima doesn’t turn on compression, so the contents of .wxmx files can be viewed in any text editor.

If the zip signature at the end of the file is still intact after renaming a broken .wxmx file to .zip most operating systems will provide a way to extract any portion of information that is stored inside it. This can be done when there is the need of recovering the original image files from a text processor document. If the zip signature isn’t intact that does not need to be the end of the world: If wxMaxima during saving detected that something went wrong there will be a wxmx~ file whose contents might help.

And even if there isn’t such a file: The .wxmx file is a container format and the XML portion is stored uncompressed. It it is possible to rename the .wxmx file to a .txt file and to use a text editor to recover the XML portion of the file’s contents (it starts with <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> and ends with </wxMaximaDocument>. Before and after that text you will see some unreadable binary contents in the text editor).

If a text file containing only this contents (e.g. copy and paste this text into a new file) is saved as a file ending in .xml, wxMaxima will know how to recover the text of the document from it.

Further reading

• [ Learn more about wxMaxima file formats ]