texdoc should use evince and not xpdf

[Alaak]

When I start texdoc with XUbuntu 8.10 it says: "sh: xpdf: not found"

Maybe it should use "evince" since it is the standard pdf viewer.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in texlive-base.
For future reference you might be interested to know that a lot of applications have bug reporting functionality built in to them. This can be accessed via the Report a Problem option in the Help menu for the application with which you are having an issue. You can learn more about this feature at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. If I have never used texdoc, what specific steps should I take to recreate this bug?

This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Kevin Godby (godbyk)]

Install the texlive-base and texlive-latex-base-doc packages (along with its dependencies). Then, at a command prompt, type:

  $ texdoc clsguide

This will report the following error message (assuming xpdf hasn't been installed):

  sh: xpdf: not found

The expected result is that a PDF document (clsgiude.pdf) will be located on the system and opened using the PDF viewer.

As a workaround, you can add the following line to your ~/.bashrc file:

  export TEXDOC_VIEWER_PDF="(evince %s) &"

and then run:

  $ source ~/.bashrc

This will tell texdoc to use evince instead of xpdf as the PDF viewer. You may have to set similar environment variables (e.g., TEXDOC_VIEWER_DVI) for other file types.

[Bruno Grenet (bgrenet)]

Hi!

It seems that texdoc uses the command "(see %s)". This behavior comes from the /usr/share/texmf/texdoc.cnf file. So the first thing to check is whether see (which is more or less an alias of run-mailcap) uses xpdf or evince. On my laptop, it used xpdf by default (written in file /etc/mailcap). I do not know if it is by default or if it comes from the installation of xpdf (that I have).

To change the behavior of run-mailcap (and thus see and texdoc), a solution is to edit ~/.mime.types to add "application/pdf pdf" and ~/.mailcap to add "application/pdf; evince %s".

Note that on my laptop, the ~/.mime.types file is useless as this is already the default behavior (coming from /etc/mime.types).

If you check /etc/mailcap, you see that other mime types use xpdf, such as x-pdf, pdf.gz, and so on. I guess it can be a good idea to use the same viewer for all of those, and so to add the corresponding lines to ~/.mailcap.

I am not an expert so I hope what I said was at least in part true. It would be nice to know how to change directly the /etc/mailcap file as a root. I mean in another way than editing it with say gedit, but through a command line. I am reluctant to directly edit it as I don't want to include some errors in it. I think it is likely to exist a way to do it!