ebook-viewer should provide a menu entry

[Angel Aguilera]

Calibre provides "ebook-viewer", a very useful tool which could be used as an standalone ".epub" viewer. As far as I know, currently the only ways to launch ebook-viewer are, either from Calibre (when you open an "epub" in that program), or directly from the command line.

Given that Evince, Ubuntu's default document viewer, currently does not support the ".epub" format (AFAIK), it would be nice if, after installing Calibre, "ebook-viewer" had an independent menu entry, to be launched as an standalone application.

The "epub" related mime types (and possibly other mime types supported by "ebook-reader" but not by "evince") could also be automatically associated to "ebook-viewer", if no previous association was found so, for instance, double clicking on an ".epub" file in Nautilus should open automatically "ebook-viewer" with the chosen file.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

calibre installs a .desktop file for both the main calibre GUI and
ebook-viewer. And it informs the system of all mimetypes it is capable
of handling. I cant give you specific instructions on how to get a menu
entry to show up on your desktop as that is highly version specific, but
search your system for ebook-viewer.desktop should be the first step.

 status invalid

[Angel Aguilera (angel-aguilera)]

Thanks for your reply, Kovid.

I know how to manually create the ".desktop" file for my system, but currently, on Ubuntu 12.10, Calibre does not provide any "ebook-viewer.desktop" file:

    angel@laptop$ dpkg -L calibre | grep desktop
    /usr/share/applications/lrfviewer.desktop
    /usr/share/applications/calibre.desktop

I have checked in my home PC (Ubuntu) and my laptop (Xubuntu). The Debian package neither provides an "ebook-viewer.desktop":

http://packages.debian.org/sid/all/calibre/filelist

But the RPM for the Fedora distro includes, as you said, a "calibre-ebook-viewer.desktop" file:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/builds/show/F-17-x86_64/calibre/0/0.8.42/1.fc17/x86_64?_csrf_token=a90daacdb425ed97f95265ee8dd21444a0790165#files

I think this bug should *not* be marked as "invalid" (at least it affects the Debian and Ubuntu packages).

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

I dont provide support for distro provided packages. Install the
official calibre binary package from the calibre website and you will get
a .desktop file. I have no clue what distro packagers do with their
packages, nor do I have the time or interest to maintain such packages
myself.

[Lorant Nemeth (loci)]

Bugreport is valid but problem is ubuntu specific as per project owner. .desktop fileis confirmed to be missing in 12.10

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.