Good afternoon,
I am currently working on my own continental polygon shapefile (.shp) in QGIS. Using the CEED shapefile as a base, I have been redrawing the polygons and their boundaries using the Split Features, Merge Selected Features, and Reshape Features tools to add more detail. This worked well for a while; the shapefile was perfectly readable by both GPlates and QGIS, and edits made using the latter software showed up well in the former.
But when I then tried to edit the shapefile in GPlates to rename some of the cookie-cut polygons and change their appearance times, I got an error message when I attempted to save the file. I tried to “Save As” in .shp format and the same message popped up. So I then saved the shapefile as a .gpml and this worked…
Except that when I attempt to save this .gpml as a shapefile again, it fails and I get an error message. Meanwhile, the original .shp file that was edited in QGIS no longer works at all. GPlates gives me a Failure to Begin. QGIS cannot begin to load it either, and when I opened a project file that used that shapefile as a layer source, I got a message stating that that layer was missing a source.
I don’t know what I did wrong here, but I think I messed up in a big, serious way. I have attached a link to a zip file that contains the original corrupted shapefile, the functional .gpml file produced from it that cannot be converted back to .shp, and some other files that accompany the shapefile. I hope that by carefully examining these files, the cause(s) of the aforementioned sticky situation can be identified and a solution found.