Re: How do I spawn an unknown viewer for a known file?

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Bastiaan Veelo wrote:

> What is the platform independent way to spawn a viewer for, say, 
> a PDF document?

I may be out of date, but I don't think this is something that is 
handled by GTK as such.  If you're using gnome, you can call
gnome_url_show() using a file://... URL for a PDF file on the 
local system.  There are also suitable calls in the win32 API and 
the Mac OS API.  

The way I handle this in my GTK app on Linux is to (a) guess at a 
set of plausible PDF viewers, (b) check at runtime which of these 
are available, and (c) give users a chance to specify a PDF viewer 
in a Preferences dialog.

Allin Cottrell

--
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University, NC