Evince Document Viewer Menu Entry
I has always bothered me that Gnome’s document viewer, evince, doesn’t show up in the Gnome menus or in Gnome-Do when I type evince. I did a bit of searching and discovered that this is because the evince .desktop files have the property NoDisplay=true in them. Apparently this tells Gnome to ignore this application for display purposes (in menus, dialogs, gnome-do, etc.). I changed this property to false and am waiting for whatever .desktop cache there is to update. I’ll update this post if this actually worked for me. I hope it does, being able to launch evince with one command in Gnome-Do would be wonderful.
I found this bug and this discussion of why NoDisplay is set to true.
Update (2009-9-27 19:13): After waiting for a while to see if evince would ever show up in the menus/gnome-do, it appears that this ‘fix’ doesn’t work. I’m not willing to put more time into this, so my current work-around is to open a directory with the pdf of interest and open the file that way. Not my preferred workflow, but it gets the job done.
Update (2009-10-7 08:46): A commenter suggested removing the NoDisplay line altogether. I’ve commented these lines out in the files /usr/share/applications/evince.desktop and /usr/share/app-install/desktop/evince.desktop. I’ll leave it like that and see if an entry for Evince shows up anwhere. I’ve actually gotten into the habbit of opening a directory in Nautilus and opening the document in question from there. If this works though, I’ll have multiple ways of doing what I want.
Update (2009-10-10 07:34): Removing the lines didn’t help. Looks like I’ll just continue using the ‘Open in Nautilus’ method.
Try removing the NoDisplay line.
Thanks to your post I was finally able to figure out how to get gnome-do to open pdf files. I removed the evince.desktop files you mentioned, uninstalled evince and installed Adobe Reader. It worked. Now I can type in the name of the pdf file and gnome-do will open it without my having to use Nautilus.
Follow up on my previous post. My fix no longer works after the last update. I have no idea why not.
If you are trying to get PDFs to open using an application other than Evince, you may want to try searching for ‘ubuntu change default PDF viewer’. The first hit I found was http://vntutor.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-change-default-pdf-reader-in.html. That describes how to change the application association for a given file type:
1) Right click on a file in nautilus of the type in question (pdf) and select properties
2) Select the ‘Open With’ tab (it may be a different name in different versions of gnome)
3) Select the application you’d like to use instead of Evince (Adobe Reader, Okular, etc)
This works system wide (I believe this updates MIME type application associations) and therefore applies to gnome-do. At least it worked for me when I tried it. I’m running Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) right now.