Re: Trouble viewing PDF attachments (with patches)

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

peder@news.klingenberg.no (Peder O. Klingenberg) writes:

> Lately, all my attempts to view PDF attachments have ended in
> 'mailcap-save-binary-file instead of popping up xpdf like they used to.
> After spending far to long last night digging through sources, the
> culprit turned out to be Lars' commit f8b31759 from December 6, which
> added the symbol doc-view-mode to mailcap-mime-data as a PDF viewer.[1]

Thanks for digging into this! I've been annoyed by the same problem for
quite a while, though obviously not annoyed enough to actually go
looking for the problem. I hope your solution or something like it is
accepted!

Eric

> This confused mm-display-part, which thought all methods should be
> strings.  Removing that test passes doc-view-mode on to
> mm-display-external, which already has provisions for funcalling
> symbols.  That's what the first attached patch does.
>
> However, the support for lisp-based "external" viewers in
> mm-display-external seems not exactly complete.  When I tried to show
> attachments with only the first patch applied, a doc-view-mode buffer
> replaced my article buffer, but focus remained in the summary buffer,
> and thus the keymaps were not those of DocView.
>
> The second patch below tries to alleviate that, but I'm out of my depth
> and not really happy with it.  What I wanted to do was to let DocView
> (or in general, whatever lisp-based viewer mailcap would return) take
> over the frame, and when I'm done with it, pop back to my gnus windows.
> Ideally, I also think that it should be configurable to pop up a new
> frame, so I can keep reading the article while looking at the PDF.
>
> I settled instead for popping back to just the summary buffer, which
> means another keystroke to reopen the article.  And the way I did that
> seems ugly and hackish to me.  Thoughts?
>
> (emacs copyright assignment is on file, should you choose to apply
> either of these patches)
>
> ...Peder...
>
> Footnotes: 
> [1] I'm not really conviced that was a good idea, but there's no reason
>     it shouldn't work in principle.  If it can be made to work as well
>     as an external viewer, I'm probably in favour, as DocView in my
>     already open emacs is much faster than spawning an external program
>     when running X remotely over the wet string they label broadband.