Something I did not encounter on Mageia but cropped up in Linux Mint is something quite strange. It's strange because it also seems counter intuitive. Especially for a distribution that does so well in keeping things user-friendly. The odd thing that happened to me in Linux Mint was that Chromium opens PDF with Gimp.
Now this is not too bad if you have a good PC. And it's not wrong either because Gimp can open PDFs and better still, edit them. But you want to open a multi-page PDF, Gimp will render each page up-front. Meaning that if the PDFs has a lot of pages, it's gonna take some time. If your rig has less than 1 GB of RAM, the wait becomes worse.
The solution is obvious: change the default setting or program for opening PDFs. Unfortunately, that didn't work for me. Set what ever it is, the default is set to Gimp. I do get a choice to switch to another program each time, but it tends to get annoying. So how does one change the default application. Apparently there is common program called xdg that helps with opening of files. Applications under freedesktop.org call on xdg to help them open document files. So for Chromimun, after it downloads a PDF file, it calls on xdg to open it. xdg determines the actual viewer and passes the name of the PDF to the viewer for it to open. The definition for the 'actual viewer' is either set by the underlying environment (KDE, GNOME, etc) or by xdg itself. The command is as follows:
xdg-mime default xpdf.desktop application/pdf
In the example above, xdg uses xpdf shortcut for the MIME type pdf. Replace xpdf with the application of your choice. This command fixed my problem.
You can query xdg whether a particular MIME type has an application defined as a default viewer or whether the mime-type is handled by xdg.
Related Links
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=137192. and https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-open
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| GIMP 2.2.8 graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The solution is obvious: change the default setting or program for opening PDFs. Unfortunately, that didn't work for me. Set what ever it is, the default is set to Gimp. I do get a choice to switch to another program each time, but it tends to get annoying. So how does one change the default application. Apparently there is common program called xdg that helps with opening of files. Applications under freedesktop.org call on xdg to help them open document files. So for Chromimun, after it downloads a PDF file, it calls on xdg to open it. xdg determines the actual viewer and passes the name of the PDF to the viewer for it to open. The definition for the 'actual viewer' is either set by the underlying environment (KDE, GNOME, etc) or by xdg itself. The command is as follows:
xdg-mime default xpdf.desktop application/pdf
In the example above, xdg uses xpdf shortcut for the MIME type pdf. Replace xpdf with the application of your choice. This command fixed my problem.
You can query xdg whether a particular MIME type has an application defined as a default viewer or whether the mime-type is handled by xdg.
Related Links
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=137192. and https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xdg-open
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