Re: Choosing a .pdf viewer

[Allan Gottlieb <gottlieb nyu edu>]

At Thu, 06 Jul 2006 09:04:10 -0400 Donald Allen <donaldcallen gmail com> wrote:

> I'm running gnome 2.12.3 on an up-to-date gentoo system. I would like to be
> able to choose the default pdf viewer used by Nautilus when I double-click
> on a .pdf file (the current default, the Gnome PDF Viewer, has serious
> rendering and performance problems with certain .pdf files and also doesn't
> appear to offer the ability to search a .pdf file). I have tried
> Settings->File Types and Programs, which I find completely unusable for this
> (and when you click Help->Help with 'File Types and Programs' settings, you
> either get a message saying the help file doesn't exist, or Nautilus
> crashes). For example, in attempting to substitute evince for the default
> .pdf viewer, I click 'pdf document' in the main window. Then I click the
> 'Open with Application' radio button and 'Edit list' in the default action
> section and add evince to the list. Then I select it in the pulldown. Then I
> click 'Ok'. Great. Except this has no effect on Nautilus' choice of a .pdf
> viewer. And if I go back to File Types and Programs and look at the entry
> for 'pdf document' in the main window, the default action is 'none'. It
> would seem like a bug report or two is in order here, which I will do. But
> meanwhile, any suggestions for working around this?

There was an update to yelp a little while ago.  Prior to that many of
my help files were crashing as well.  I just now to test, change the
application for pdfs from "document viewer", i.e. evince to "other
application", emacs.  It worked fine and I change it back.  Also the
help displayed fine.

I too am running gentoo (stable x86).  Here is my yelp data.

    ajglap gottlieb # eix yelp
    * gnome-extra/yelp
         Available versions:  2.12.2 2.12.2-r1 ~2.14.2-r1 ~2.14.2-r2
         Installed:           2.12.2-r1
         Homepage:            http://www.gnome.org/
         Description:         Help browser for GNOME


    Found 1 matches
    ajglap gottlieb #

Good luck,
allan