<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: mailcap



Toby wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > That implies to me that you want a text mode pdf reader.
> 
> FYI pdftotext (from xpdf-utils) gives a readable output from most PDFs

Oh very good!  I had not known about pdftotext before.  But looking at
it I see that it requires an input file as a file and won't read
stdin.  Therefore it appears to me that it needs a wrapper script to
adapt it nicely for use in mailcap.  Here is one possibility.

  #!/bin/sh
  case $1 in
    *.pdf)
      TMPNAME="$(dirname "$1")/$(basename "$1" .pdf).txt"
      trap 'rm -f "$TMPNAME"' EXIT
      pdftotext "$1"
      cat "$TMPNAME"
      exit 0
      ;;
  esac
  echo "Error: Needs NAME.pdf file argument." 1>&2
  exit 1

With that pdftotext.sh wrapper then the following mailcap entry works
for me.

  application/pdf; pdftotext.sh '%s'; copiousoutput; description=Portable 
Document Format; nametemplate=%s.pdf

Bob