On 12/07/2011 06:01 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
It seems the default PDF reader for EL 6 is evince. In which file(s) is this set so that I can select a different default application? If any of these files are not plain ASCII text, but require a special application to read/write the file, which such application(s)?
This is a desktop/window manager specific setting. If you install KDE and Gnome you can have each prefer a different application for a specific MIME type (in this case PDF).
Evince is free, safe, and is the default reader nearly everywhere for Linux. Adobe Reader/Acrobat have some pretty large security issues (hopefully well tacked down by SELinux, but hope != security_plan).
PDFs are not ASCII text. PDF is an extension of the PostScript language that printers speak which describe how a document should look and what it should do, which includes a description of text to include, but this is not restricted to ASCII characters by any means. PDF adds to PS in ways that let a document do a few things dynamically based on environment (like switch date formats around), include user input fields (and change based on what is input/selected), accept digital signatures, etc. Many static PDFs passed about in business are nothing more than scans of text, which mean they are pictures of a page which contains text, not the actual text itself. It is quite common to receive documents in mass business mailings which are just a giant jpeg image pasted to a standard page-size background which is called a PDF because the scanner/digital sender formatted it that way -- but its not actually text and you can't copy/paste it (this is also why a PDF exported from OpenOffice will be often measured in kilobytes, while a scan of a printout of the same thing can easily be a few megabytes/page at high resolution + color).
For Gnome2 you can find settings for nearly everything in gconf editor. This is usually found under Applications > System Tools > Configuration Editor if you've installed it, I believe.
I personally prefer Evince for nearly everything and use it as much as possible. For digital signatures which must conform to Adobe's way of doing things, however, I open documents in Acrobat Reader -- but I do not set the default PDF reader to Acrobat Reader. In Gnome you can just right-click, and select "Open With >" and pick the PDF capable software you want. I also use Xournal a lot for PDF markup and passing notes around, so this is another program I access by right-clicking quite frequently on PDF files -- but my default is still happily set to Evince (and you'll find it is by far the fastest loading PDF/PS file reader available right now).
