Launching an application from inside a PDF?

[Bill Harris <bill_harris facilitatedsystems com>]

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I create presentations in LaTeX beamer for classes I teach, and I often
make use of the construct

\href{run:filename.mdl}

In Adobe Reader under Windows, that would lead to the file being opened
in Vensim, the application associated with it by virtue of the
extension.

That doesn't work in evince (or, for that matter, in xpdf) in Linux, and
I'd like to figure out if it's possible.

I succeeded in using assogiate to give the proper MIME type to the file
in question based on the extension, and I can open it by double-clicking
in Nautilus or on the desktop.  (FWIW, I'm running Ubuntu 8.04LTS.)  I
wrote a short script to open the file, because the application, Vensim,
runs under Wine, and my script is in ~/bin, which is in my PATH.

When I try clicking on a link created by the beamer construct shown
above in evince, nothing seems to happen.  If I hover my mouse over the
link, it does say "Launch filename.mdl".

If I run evince filename.mdl from bash, evince opens and says "Unable to
open document: Unhandled MIME type: "text/plain".  However, if I open
the file's properties in Nautilus, it says it's of MIME type
application/x-vensim (the new MIME type I created).  I did run `
update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime/` after running assogiate to
update the database.

What am I missing to get evince to see the same MIME type as Nautilus
sees?  If I succeed in persuading evince of the correct MIME type, is
this likely to work?

Thanks,

Bill
- -- 
Bill Harris                      http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/
Facilitated Systems                              Everett, WA 98208 USA
http://facilitatedsystems.com/                  phone: +1 425 337-5541
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